Article Contributed on: 5/1/2009 12:30:04 PM
You have been stranded by the side of the road with a flat tire. After a few expletives deleted, you start thinking about what to do to get yourself back on the road. You open the back, find the spare, get out the tools, and get to it. You do not replace the air filter and hope that fixes it. Everyone knows that.
Yet we continue to believe that it is possible to fix greed with legislation the same way we'd fix the flat tire with the air filter. Greed is not a matter of the body politic -- it is an illness -- a disease if you will, of the soul. One who is greedy is never sated. There is never enough money or power to fill the empty soul. That greed (of the magnitude we've seen) is a part of our culture should be a red flag that our people are incapable of feeling good about themselves unless they are conspicuously consuming and proving with the trappings of their wealth, their value. We have allowed a culture to develop that dotes on those with money and ignores the rest.
Lifestyles of the rich and famous fascinate us. Wealth is given a wide berth. Nearly any crime can be committed with minor repercussion if the perpetrator can come up with enough money for an exquisite legal defense. Men of substance, as we so clearly saw when Bill Gates went before a Congressional committee recently, are fawned upon shamelessly by politicians. Bernie Madoff was never questioned; he must be honorable, look how wealthy he is, he knows how to make us money. One who can throw lavish parties and has connections with wealthy people is sought after as a friend. It's human nature, warts and all, and it hasn't changed at least since the Egyptian Pharaohs.
It's one of the reasons that, in spite of all the harm that's been done to our economy by those fiercely determined to own that outrageously opulent apartment in Manhattan or that palace in Beverly Hills, we're still willing to keep paying for their sins with bailouts.
In our culture, money has become the way we measure ourselves, and if the best and brightest (which we have tended equate with the richest) among us fail spectacularly, it's unacceptable. Somehow, even though we are absolutely furious with them for the betrayal, it's more acceptable to force everyone else to pay for their mistakes.
Greed is one of the "seven deadly sins" in the Catholic Church's catalog of the human condition, that dates way back into antiquity, and still applies. The things that got us into hot water in the Middle Ages are still with us, making mayhem in our lives if we don't practice self-control: greed, lust, wrath, sloth, gluttony, pride and jealousy. They are alive in every country, but where the culture finds "greed is good" and socially rewards it, and other flaws are found excuses for (a good deal of money is made via the divorce courts, so lust and jealously are alive and well too), the dangers multiply. But the social fabric and the inner soul cannot be fixed with legislation. We have to do it ourselves.
The country that began with a proud heritage of independent self-reliance, with a constitution with checks and balances to keep human nature from harming our common welfare, has been subverted by our new laziness when it comes to tracking what our government is doing (sloth), our arrogant view that we are superior to other countries and should tell them how to live (pride) and our self-centered view of the world in which whoever dies with the most toys wins (greed). The strong work ethics of the past have been replaced by a cultural ethic that says it doesn't matter how you get your money as long as you win big. We've taught our children that the size of their homes are worth more than the size of their hearts.
Declaring capitalism the culprit, however, and using legislation to destroy the free market in the name of fixing greed in the nation will do absolutely nothing to fix the mindset that caused all of this.
In its natural environment (when government is not mucking about trying to steer it, or allowing it to steer government), a truly unfettered free market is self-regulating to some degree. Fierce competition keep prices lower and services better, because in a free market, the shots are called by the consumers. If they don't like a product you make, they buy one from your competition. If you guess wrong and don't listen to your customers' needs, you go out of business, and the other guys get the sales. The ones who guessed right, did their homework, and understood the market. The ones who sold faulty products got sued, and were prosecuted for fraud (at least when the politics aren't intertwined with the profits).
When we stopped watching our government, it became possible for the not-so-swift to start getting their customers by using the powers of government to push out their competition. The first Chrysler bailout did get paid back, but it set a precedent that will keep our descendants is debt for many years to come. Allowing campaign contributions from businesses and corporations made it possible to dampen any tendencies to prosecute when issues of fraud or misleading the customers came up. Legislation appeared and mergers previously disallowed to prevent monopolies were suddenly OK, and we didn't notice how much the telecommunications and banking industries were giving to the campaign coffers.
This time period is not the first to have seen galloping greed. But rarely has legislation stopped the process. Cultural changes that came from the works of Charles Dickens led to new kinds of peer pressures (as the stories on the news about folks losing their homes and jobs are doing today), in which those who flaunted their riches were considered flawed, limited, and kind of pathetic examples of humanity. Dickens lived through the excesses of the industrial revolution, and saw the reasons for and the creation of the labor movements, but he understood greed as a personal flaw, rather than the product of business. Scrooge didn't stop being a businessman; he just stopped being a greedy jerk.
The problem is, we are associating that feeling now with a belief that only a non market-based economy can keep greed from flourishing, which is not the case. The examples from the old Soviet Union should be enough (although they don't seem to be) to tell us that trying to centralize under government power to prevent capitalism doesn't work; it will neither do what it claims to do, nor benefit the people it is set up to help. Power replaced money, and the well connected still had the most influence, got the best apartments, got off the hook when they did something wrong, and got the highest degrees of respect without earning it; those without connections were still on the outs. As to greed, when capitalism came back, it was immediately clear all those years of socialism did nothing to contain it.
To say capitalism causes greed is like saying food causes gluttony (and there are some these days who are actually saying that as well). It's not the food, it's that empty soul that we try to fill up with food. Food provides major benefits to health and happiness. Take away the checks and balances that normally prevent gluttony: self-control, self-confidence, hope for the future, deferred gratification, and self-awareness, and you get obesity.
Capitalism is no different. It can bring untold benefits to education, to the arts, and to technological advancement, but take away open competition, with quality and service to the customer at its core, fiscal responsibility, self-control, internal audit, and then add in political entanglement, and you get economic disaster.
There's a bumper sticker that reads "Where buying and selling are controlled by Congress, the first things bought and sold are the politicians"
Congress folks are human and have all the same tendencies towards the deadly sins the rest of us have, with one exception. They have a lot more temptations.
So, how do we fix greed? Bring back the controls. Not the government controls, but real free market controls (not NAFTA-style, preferred trading partner stuff but real competition). Hold businesses accountable for their own finances, and for their own marketing and design decisions. Let them fail when they have actually already failed the customers. And let the businesses who are willing to do the right thing for the right reasons, who care about their customers, and their employees, not about pumping billions into campaign coffers to help steer legislation, get the profits.
Stop thinking that government regulation does anything more than convince big business that it's in their best interests to get a handle on the government through campaign contributions. Politicians aren't going to bite the hand that feeds them their power. Stop thinking that just letting our elected officials do their job without any attention or oversight from us is a safe bet. Get information on the people put up for election. Find out if they have the self-control and hard headed-ness to buck the system that now keeps corporate interests first. And stop believing that taking money out of the pockets of everyone to give it to specific others is going to do anything to grow our economy. America was built on independence, and until we see some sign of that returning, we will never be the country we were meant to be, and our economic slump will continue until we figure that out.
There is no way to avoid, I'm afraid, the job losses and bad credit, and the host of other woes we are going to have to go through before this is over. It took generations of looking the other way and thinking "they're the government, they must know what they are doing" to get things into this mess. It will take awhile to get out of it. Stop blaming the guys on the other side of the aisle (your party gets money from the same folks unless you're in a third party or you're an independent), and start looking at the issues and the individual candidates, not the blame game or the spin.
So what am I saying, we should be fighting the seven deadly sins? Well, much as even I think it sounds a bit silly when I say it, Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Practice self-reliance, self-control, willingness to do things without reward, and study the issues. Pack up the selfishness, the emotional tendencies to react to spin, and spend some time looking at what's going on in your local government and across the country. Trust yourself and work hard on the flaws that we all share. Consider it a do-it-yourself project. What can it hurt?