Watching last night’s Republican debates, I finally accepted something I’ve long suspected but have been unwilling to believe: An extraordinary number of Americans know nothing, nothing, about the political and economic history of their own country. If it were otherwise, the journos and the audience would have laughed that bunch right off the stage.
First, it was not excessive regulations that brought-on the Great Recession of 2008, it was lack of regulation. Unpoliced, securities firms were packaging and selling mortgages backed by nothing but worthless IOU’s — in essence, creating money out of thin air with no stuff to make it good. The fear, when the scam finally went to hell, was that the economy would suffer a massive deflation, or shrinkage of the money supply. Best estimates place the amount of funny-money then in circulation in the neighborhood of 15-20%.
This points, to my mind, to the most serious failure of the Obama administration: It hasn’t put scores of crooked financiers in prison. And Americans are falling for the line that it was all the fault of busybody bureaucrats? Seriously?
Second, it was the unions that built the most vibrant middle class in history, who starting in the first decades of the 1900s took by force a piece of the Gilded Age’s pie — who demanded health insurance, secure retirements, and college opportunities for their children. (Repayment of my student loans if I defaulted was guaranteed by the Ford Foundation, for instance, and I can’t for the life of me think how I would have borrowed the money and gone to college without them.)
Americans never had it so good as when the unions forced upon the very wealthy a form of industrial socialism. It wasn’t European-style socialism to be sure — and so we were able to deny it was socialism — but it was certainly a share-the-wealth program that was strenuously enforced. Conservatives need to recall, too, that Adam Smith wrote not only The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments — which condemns the laissez faire economic policies based on the former and beloved by the very wealthy.
Third, the Middle East has been in turmoil ever since Moses made-up the politically-useful story that Our Invisible Friend had promised to give all that arid wasteland to he and his tribe — and a bigger badder military isn’t going to fix that. We need to update the containment strategy that took down the USSR and wait for the people of the Middle East to get sick of their putrid theocracies and free themselves; we can’t do it for them. Yes, ISIS is horrible; they are reprising daily the indecencies of the Old Testament. Realistically, we can’t do anything about that sickness but wait for it to run its course — and keep it away from us. Remember the examples of Germany, Japan, Vietnam — it is self-interest and free markets that win the peace.
Fourth, and in spite of the interminable moaning about corruption in Washington, nobody has yet proposed the barest correction. We need to …
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Undo Citizens United; that will probably require a constitutional amendment, so let’s get busy on that.
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Shorten the campaign season to 8- to 12-weeks.
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Put all private money out of elections and publicly finance the sharply abbreviated campaigns.
The Founders assumed an engaged, informed citizenry that looked after its interests. What we have in the Republican base (and on the left, albeit to a significantly lesser degree) are dullards who really don’t know that they are being lied to and misused, and laughed at, as the political shock troops of the very people whose serial dishonesties and frauds are making them so uneasy. Bah.