Well you wouldn't know it from looking out the window this moment, but spring is officially only a few short weeks away. Spring is that magical changing of the seasons that the ancients looked forward to – the symbolic and literal re-birth of the natural world after the seasonal death that is winter. Make no mistake – this has been one tough winter. Ice on the east coast and rain on the west has been coupled with economic catastrophe and financial panic as banks slide into oblivion and the roles of the unemployed swell under the weight of this drenching hundred-year storm.
The Cause of All of This
Some people will tell you they know what caused this financial shit-storm; they'll tell you it was over-regulation, too much government. Or they'll look you straight in the eye and tell you it was de-regulation – a lack of government oversight that lead to this pickel. They'll point to the bankers, or the banking system. They'll signal the realtors, or the people who bought houses they couldn't afford, or the lenders who made the loans, or the banks who packaged the loans and sold them to other banks. It could be the politicians, or the Federal Reserve, Al Queada, or the Chinese. There is plenty of finger-pointing to go around but I will tell you right here and now what the cause of all this chaos is:
Dishonesty
That's it in a nutshell. I'm not specifically talking about the real dishonest brokers, the Bernie Madoffs or the Allen Stanfords of the world – though they are certainly worthy of plenty of scorn for their complete sleaziness. But they are only symptoms of a system that went haywire.
Capitalism...
Some people are saying all of this signals the death of capitalism. I think that's dumb. Capitalism can't die – it isn't a living thing. Capitalism is a theory – same as socialism or communism. Capitalism, socialism, and communism all work splendidly – on paper. The problem is that in the real world these systems are only as good as the people who ascribe to them. Communism failed in the Soviet Union because it is eminently corruptible and the greedy slime-merchants who care more about their own personal accumulation of power and wealth inevitably claw their way to the top. Well today it is pretty easy to argue the same thing of capitalism -it just took a little longer for the corruption to manifest itself.
In my eyes the problem is that we, as a nation ostensibly of capitalists, lost our way. For capitalism to work it has to be based on actual value of goods and services. Value is the key word in the equation and value has to be calculated honestly.
Greed took over. Our businesses, driven to always show increasing profit, took to hiding and deferring actual costs – thus creating an artificial and inaccurate representation of value. Personally I think so many of our goods are under-priced. If we took an honest accounting of the value of the goods we buy, an accounting that included the human and environmental costs of those goods, there is no way you would be eating three hamburgers a day. No way. There is no way our closets would be so full of clothes that we don't wear, or that we could actually throw food away at the end of each week.
Resurrection
I think we'll come out of our current hardships. I think we'll probably even come out stronger for them. But we've got to start being honest like we've never been honest before. As consumers we have to really educate ourselves. We have to understand where our food and our clothing and our luxuries come from – and it isn't going to be good enough to just close our eyes or put the blinders on and ignore the human catastrophe of the textile industry overseas, or the environmental catastrophe of the beef industry in the Amazon. And the time for justifying atrocity by siting profit are going to be long gone. Greed, pride, lust for wealth – these motivations need to go the way of the dodo bird – and the mutants who adhere to these misanthropic philosophies need to be shunned from a society that re-embraces ethical and moral business practice.
This does not mean wealth cannot be created – wealth is created as value is created. Any wealth that is not derived from actual value is unethical and possibly immoral in the world of tomorrow.
madbob@madbob.com
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