Sinking Slowly Beneath the Waves

 

The trouble here is not the working classes. The working classes of both nations are well educated, and willing to work. That seems to be largely true worldwide. So why is the world economic system in so much trouble? Largely because the regulators lost their capacity to regulate in the face of screams of, “We don’t need no stinking regulation.”

 

Those screams came out of the mouths of the free market revolutionaries. They are the people who used their MBA’s and economics degrees indiscriminately to enrich themselves at a huge cost to the rest of us. Of course, many of us knew something was crazy about the ranting about freeing markets from scrutiny, simplicity and regulatory oversight. What was wrong has come home to roost.

 

It is not the thanksgiving turkey sitting in the tree outside the window of all of our middle class homes these days. It is the turkey buzzard we are dealing with here, and the middle class worldwide comprises its contemplated banquet. In a sequence of unseemly social and questionable ethical and moral acts, a small intermediary class has risen above the rest of us.

 

That rising tide includes the bankers the brokers the economists and hedge fund managers, people who convinced enough of us that they knew what they were doing. It does not include the middle class worker or their children. Most emphatically, it does not include the lower classes who never own anything but their body. For most of them, that is more of a liability than an asset after forty.

 

The idea that a rising tide lifts all ships only works when the pilots haven’t run the ship of economic state on the rocks. The lifeboats are for the bankers and brokers, the Economists and the media pundits, not the run of the mill working class. The last century was defined by the struggle between capitalism and Communism on one level. Communism lost.

 

On an entirely different level, it was a different struggle. It was a struggle to understand how an economic architecture could be built to include more of the world’s population in a rising and productive middle class. The high priests of Economics and Social Science won the war for us. Communism is over. The problem is so is Capitalism in its glorification of greed and its insatiable drive for advantage. We are left without a sensible set of guiding principles.

 

We are poised over a precipice with one foot beyond support and our torso too far forward for balance to win out. However far we fall we will have to hope that we have the healing powers of Wile E. Coyote combined with the resilience of a redwood. Recovering from two thousand years of fires, droughts and natural disasters is one thing. Recovering from our own intrepid human nature might be quite another.