Materialistic consumption not the American Dream

GUEST COMMENTARY

By George Templeton

Payson

HEAVY DARKNESS

“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again. Because a vision softly creeping, left its seeds while I was sleeping.” Dark always settles to the bottom off a lake. Submerge just below the surface and you will notice an absence of dark. Lower yourself to 15 feet below the surface and you will notice a degree of darkness even on a sunny, bright day. Lower yourself to 50 feet or more below the surface and you are in total dark. The dark has settled to the bottom; therefore it is heavier than light. This story describes an excusable error. The data was correct but the conclusion is wrong. Actually dark is heavier than water!

Unbiased, accurate, complete, factual data is the beginning of understanding. Economists love data, but what does the data mean? Different people will create different explanations for data, and with thoughtful contemplation, the same people may create different models to explain it at a different time. This is all good and healthy. But false data adjusted to support a desired conclusion, incomplete or omitted data, and misrepresentation can obscure the truth and cause damage. Our beliefs take form influenced by culture, education, experience, and our friends. Explanations to support them come later. Remember that when it does not make sense or is too simple, easy, or good to be true it probably is not true.

Freud felt that civilization existed to protect man from the cruelty of nature, and that man resented and rebelled in defiance of the constraints that were placed on his behavior. Civilization had to be defended against the individual. Its regulations and institutions were directed toward that task. There is a constitutional doctrine of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Americans don’t want to be governed from the left, right, or center. They want to govern themselves. Anarchism is the belief that all forms of government are incompatible with individual and social liberty and should be abolished. There will always be conflict between the rights of the individual and the rights of society. We want freedom, but freedom implies responsibility. They are the opposite sides of the coin. One cannot exist without the other. There remains the idea that government is bad and should be made as inconsequential as possible, but government preserves the present and enables the future.In Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, The True Believer, he claims “… they must be intensely discontented, yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader, or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.” True belief interposes “… a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.” They claim “…that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and there is no truth or certitude outside of it." The party line is “… the embodiment of the one and only truth. Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense, and sublime truth are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth.”

HISTORY

In 1955 American had a monopoly in nuclear power, electronics, communications, transportation, and virtually all the world’s industrial manufacturing. Made in America meant the best. Government played a critical role in our rise to world leadership. Americans felt that they could make friends, spread democracy, foster prosperity, fight famine, and promote world peace. America could not lose. That was the American dream.

Sputnik was a wake-up call that launched a government assisted revolution in science education, research, and defense. On high-school career day, the majority of the boys aspired to a career in engineering. We knew our day would come and we were proud to be alive when science fiction became reality with the landing on the moon.

A 1957 sociology book expressed grave concern that there would be no way to apportion the world’s wealth because of the development of the computer and automation. Instead, the computer and the internet eventually expanded working hours by making it possible to take one’s office with them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We were no longer living in the country we once knew but we still had the opportunity to work hard, thrive, and succeed.

In the 80’s, computers and high speed automation empowered the production worker. They required a high degree of skill and allowed workers to become individually significant for the success of the business. The production worker was on-line, engaging in a dialogue with the production apparatus, using statistics, and proudly making decisions that influenced quality and productivity. There was satisfaction in a job well done, making a difference, and of course a good salary with benefits. Unfortunately for American workers, this was transferred overseas.

The claim that government regulations or unions caused us to relocate jobs overseas is ridiculous. We strived to treat all foreign employees like their USA counterparts because that was the fair ethical thing to do and because we wanted to avoid problems on the other side of the earth. All equipment that was exported was upgraded, refurbished, or new and met OSHA safety regulations. Production remained labor intensive, and competitive pressures required both automation and cheap labor.

It’s hard to do the right thing when you are making money. The 2008 catastrophe was a great party. The cure for the hangover was correctly another shot of spending. Clyde Prestowitz in his book The Betrayal of American Prosperity reports that collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps have ballooned to 400 trillion dollars, roughly 10 times the world GDP. A Tea-Party cure would take us back to the time of the Pilgrims, a simpler religious time when a degree in theology was the qualification for navigating a ship. It was not until Franklin’s academies and the advent of vocational education that navigation was taught in schools. Would you prefer a ship’s captain who could pray for your rescue or one who could steer the ship? But why stop there? The church in the middle ages held that usury was a sin. St. Thomas Aquinas felt that it depended on whether an activity “added value”. It was unethical to buy and sell an item for profit without improving it. Dambisa Moyo in her book How the West Was Lost sees the problem as fiscal dereliction of duty on the part of the creditor to keep the leverage spree of the debtor equity holder in-line. There remains the belief that the efficient unregulated market is optimum, ethical, and self-correcting.

TODAY

When you cut an arm off sometimes there remains sensations and the illusion that the arm is still there. But no amount of stimulus will make that arm actually move and become real. So it is with our post-industrial economy and jobs that have been sent overseas.

Corporate CEOs see their job as making short-term profits and increasing the value of the company stock. What is lacking are metrics for civic responsibility to workers, suppliers, government, and the community who made the business possible. Globalization raises questions regarding what an American company is. The policies that benefit global corporations are not necessary those that are best for America. It has even been argued that overseas production by USA corporations should count as USA exports.

We cut education first and deepest. A victory is declared because the following month the savings are on the spread sheet. But in the long run the supply of people needed for technical leadership are depleted. In Europe, government, education, and industry cooperate with internships at the undergraduate level. This provides the expensive practical experience that is largely absent in America and increases the chance of finding jobs and paying back student loans. Factory relocations suggest that young engineers should learn a foreign language and plan on starting their careers overseas. Don’t think that all will be well if we just sell innovative ideas. The practice of translating American text books and ignoring copyrights abounds.

JOBS

Fifteen foreign workers can be hired for the price of one American. Cheap goods for the American consumer were felt to outweigh the loss of the high-paying benefited manufacturing jobs that sustained our middle class. Currency manipulation, trade policies, geopolitical strategies, and the belief that countries don’t compete didn’t help. Foreign governments implement strategies to dominate targeted industries. Our government is too quick to give our competencies away without regard to the synergism that comes from having healthy manufacturing industries here in America. Ed Shultz, in his book Killer Politics documents the loss of 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the last decade. Since the great recession, two million manufacturing workers have lost their jobs. You recognize American names on appliances, but they are designed and built overseas. One-hundred new jobs make a news event these days, but overseas the increases are 1000 times greater. Some factories are bigger than many cities with employee counts in the hundreds of thousands in South Korea and approaching one million in China. Factory skyscrapers fade into the horizon. Binoculars are needed to make them out and cars are mandatory to travel between them. We should be concerned about the extent of overseas monopolies and their impact on our society. It could be dangerous to have too many eggs in one basket.

FUTURE

Thornton Parker, in his book What If Boomers Can’t Retire, warns about a stock-market collapse caused by the baby boom demographic bubble. Too few workers to buy our stocks when it comes time to sell could drive their value down to pennies on the dollar. He advocated investment in tangibles with real value like houses! Alan Greenspan warns about populism in his book The Age of Turbulence. He celebrates the shift away from industry to information technology, but now that is also migrating away.

How the past perishes is how the future becomes. Our jobs are not coming back because we have forgotten how to do them, our tools are obsolete, and we are overpaid. We can’t expect the foreigners to train us like we did them. They are not going to give up their economy without a fight. Fifty years of trade policy, tax breaks, investment deregulation, and well intentioned government policy promoting housing instead of research and development brought us to our present economic dilemma. Because of its global and geopolitical scope, it is not something that small business alone can fix. Fair competition is necessary. Government, education, and industry need to come together to identify technologies that are promising for development, future profitability, and export, and then devise a national strategy promoting and maintaining technical leadership and opportunity for our middle class. It won’t mean tariffs on everything. We just won’t give our technical leadership away. As it stands, biological technology may be the only remaining area of American superiority. This will take patience, commitment, compromise, and cooperation. It won’t happen overnight, so any program has to be able to survive the changes in politics and ideology that seem to characterize our system.

Materialistic consumption is not the American Dream. It is about Yankee ingenuity, satisfaction in a job well done and in the expression of individual creativity for the good of the world. Materialism does not bring lasting happiness.