Dear America,
I had something else in mind for today's epistle, but two pieces in the New York Times this morning struck me as more timely. First, The Times reported that an Ebola vaccine was developed ten years ago and went as far in development as tests on monkeys which were 100% successful. That success rate in other primates is promising, but it doesn't always presage success in human trials. Still, the indicia of success that animal trials represent are the best indicator of the prospect of human efficacy, so further development was indicated...except for one thing. Ebola is a rare disease despite the fact that it is in everyone's mind and on the tip of everyone's tongue these days. For that reason, the profit motive that is the life's blood of a free market economy was absent, and thus, further development of the vaccine, which had been brought to the point of the successful animal trials in either government labs or in research institutions like colleges and universities I assume, was left to languish on a dusty shelf somewhere without further prospects of culmination in a useful human medicine. The human tests are now in the offing, but for thousands of victims it is too little too late.
The second piece was David Brooks' editorial about the deficiencies in American politics and their institutions. It started out looking like a liberal tract on the subject of how to revive our economy and on whom such efforts should be concentrated. But it quickly fell into the rut that conservative social theory always runs in: some people don't want to work and government should abandon them; we should educate everyone in college so that he can get a good paying job; we shouldn't be considering wealth stratification as the problem because people could get more out of college degrees than they could out of redistributing the recently gotten gains of the top 1%. (As to this last point however, despite Brooks' assertion that doing so would be relatively insignificant, such redistribution of accrued wealth in the top 1% to the entire bottom 99% would yield $7,000 per household. Apparently David Brooks does very well, but $7,000 is big money to me, and its retention by such a small contingent in our society looks like a problem to me as well, but I digress.) While he suggests remedies for the malaise among members of our workforce precipitated by the fact that, while the rich have done very well in the past thirty years, the rest of us have not accrued wealth at all in real terms, and that while many of us have gone back to work, our jobs pay less and are more menial, they are a mixture of measures to encourage the holders of capital to invest more by reducing their taxes with more regressive ideas like eliminating social programs that support people who are not employed and helping them to relocate to where the jobs are. He does advocate infrastructure projects, but he specifically mentions public transportation so that those who are not where the jobs are can more easily get there, while he makes no mention of raising the minimum wage.
I have thoughts on David Brooks' take on the dysfunction of our economy, and perhaps that will be the topic of discussion next Tuesday, but my focus at this moment is on the role of government in both of these ambits. I mentioned the role of government on Tuesday, and my point was then, as it is now, that there are some things that, not only is government most appropriately suited to do, but that will not be done unless government does them. While David Brooks' insouciance about the role of government in the lives of those who for one reason or another are less fortunate than he, programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security do more to support our economy by putting money into circulation through consumption than investment by those with capital has ever done. Things like Eisenhower's interstate transportation system and our public school system--which is far from perfect but still provides a modicum of education to tens of millions who otherwise would have none--would never be undertaken by those with the resources necessary to indulge in large scale philanthropy or even self-serving investment. It takes government to marshal the not just the resources, but the will to accomplish much of what makes a society like ours not just a free market, but egalitarian as well. And if we put more stock, and more money, into institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, we might have had an Ebola vaccine when the first case in the current epidemic occurred, and it might not have become an epidemic at all. And if we don't start investing in our infrastructure soon, it portends to fall into disrepair and will undermine our free market because those who profit from its existence will never be willing to invest in it...even for their own benefit collectively. Collectively is the operative word in all this.
Our politicians are the only ones who can recognize these truths to the effect of changing our currently emerging ethos, which would have us draw back from the tradition of government tending needs toward the end of mutual well-being for all of us. We can set aside the moral issues, though I don't believe we should, but to ignore the practical ones is like whistling in the dark. Our problems will not be solved by paying off the national debt, though that may be a useful goal. We will not again flourish because we reduce taxes putting more money in the hands of people who are not our benefactors, but rather seek only to enlarge their fortunes. And to allow the unemployed to become homeless as well just creates another problem to take the place of the federal deficits that are created by feeding them and housing them. Our national destiny may be a function of our diversity and the initiative and self-reliance that has inspired us to thrive as a people. But what has created our nation is the manner in which we are organized, and by that I mean our system of government and the policies that it has spawned. There is a role for government to play in our national life...big government. And we ignore it at our peril and the world's.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment