Ya Gotta Save It

(First published December 2007)

Last week got away before I was able to get to two campaign-type political events that are still worthy of mention. The reason for this is that they both illustrate what can happen when financial mania combines with the desperation of former political frontrunners- meaning their ambition.

The first event just has to be the “religion” speech of former-Mass. Governor Mitt Romney in Dallas, TX this past week. The real reason this speech had to happen was Mitt’s severe late decline in the public opinion polls. The similarity to a somewhat similar speech given by JFK during his Presidential run in 1960 was played up for all it was worth- mostly just to generate a news buzz in the short term. It worked like a charm too, since it dominated talk-radio shows and the Net for days. Now it’s a week later, and it all seems like a storm that passed and few even remember what the fuss was all about. Since we are striving for perspective (if not enlightenment), a few facts need to be highlighted. First, polls only reflect the overall flightiness of opinion- most people haven’t figured out that an election happens next year, yet. Second, Mitt’s speech did not seem to be so much about religion (some news outlets did point out that he only mentioned the word “Mormon” once), than a simply magnificient peroration on our unique nation’s origins as well as the many reasons for its exceptionalism. If I did not know better, I would have been easy to swing into the Romney camp on the seeming strength of this vision he seemed to lay out. But, I do, and I already (therefore) support Thompson- the only real conservative in the running. All this having been said, Mitt cynically used the religion issue as something known in politics as a “straw dog”. He has lost his poll lead in Iowa, and Iowa success means everything to him. This is why he gave THE SPEECH. Incidentally, his ongoing quasi-colloquy about religion (with Mike Huckabee) is not only undignified and inane, its beginning to get very old. Has it occurred to either of them that it is no coincidence that the main forum for all of this silliness is the NY TIMES- as in showing who they think the target audience is. One final point, and I will let THE SPEECH go; only a few months  ago, Mitt told some reporters that his advisers wanted him to give “the religion speech”, but he didn’t feel it was a good idea. Now we’re told that he wrote the speech himself. Think the truth got shaded a little? You be the judge. Probably, a staffer will be found to take the fall. It’s the corporate thing to do. THE SPEECH should more rightly be called THE SHAM- a great latter-day (pun intended) example of how ersatz our politics has become. 

The second event comes right out of the “financial side”. Last week, it seemed virtually everybody wanted to be caught clambering aboard the munificience bandwagon in the cause of helping all of those poor unfortunate putative homeowners caught up in the subprime mortgage mess. I can understand the sympathy factor in play here- most especially in a political year. What you had better understand, however, is that both the monetary (as in the Federal Reserve) and , now, the fiscal sides of government are fully engaged in searching for “solutions” for the supposed-housing crisis. Hillary’s support is to be expected. After all, she is already a statist anyway, plus she (like Romney) is losing her long-held lead in the polls. President Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t even have the excuse of political expediency. Some “adviser” has visited the President with apocolyptic visions of financial collapse; and Bush bought it.

I’ll leave out all of the details few people care about anyway, because they are all beside the basic philisophical point I want to make. This is my point: We badly need to get beyond the spectacle of government economic bailouts in the United States. They are clearly a part of our past- as in the Great Depression or Jimmy Carter’s bailout of Chrysler- and they deserve to be left in the past. Politicians (some of them desperate), from both parties have, since Herbert Hoover lost the election in 1932, seen their fortunes rise and fall with those of the economy- and (like the income tax) it has all been a wonderful historical example of a classic WRONG TURN. Worse what has been a massive ongoing mistake has morphed into a death spiral.

Please let me explain: At any given time, government policies will have very small effect on an economy that is 14 TRILLION dollars big. But, over time,(100 years plus to be exact) the successive accretions of government influence- backed by police power- along with bad habits of overdependence they encourage, have saddled our economy with more and more dead weight to pull. After more than a century of this, the effects are beginning to overload the once-limitless circuits of a once-free enterprise system. That’s why the late 19^th century was considered such a golden age for American business. It was a time, before regulations, when the Founding Fathers of American industry- later denounced as Robber Barrons- built the foundations of an economic and financial powerhouse. As NEWSWEEK columnist George Will has so often said: we have long been living off the seed corn planted (some harvested) during that golden age.

If we want this century to be ours, or even if we simply want to survive, we are all going to have to stipulate, together, that the course of economic affairs in general, and business matters in particular, is not the fault of anything a government official anywhere does or doesn’t do. In Star Trek terms, this must become the new Prime Directive- or we will not survive. The life of the nation has to go on beyond us. It must be there for our children- our ambassadors we send forward to live in a time we will never see.

Once we are done with this basic argument (a process that could take years), we will then have the chance to proceed with our newfound consensus, to clear away the excesses, the waste, the dangerous entitlement attitudes that have grown like kudzu, and the poisonous rhetoric that has been choking our ability to perform economically. Then we will start to address critical issues we have been putting off and, finally, restructure our tax and financial system so we can compete (again) internationally. The wonder of it all is that we have done as well as we do for as long as we have. It’s a testimonial to the remarkably resillient system that was bequeathed to us all. But the time is long gone when we can, any longer, take our future achievement for granted. As Rome proved, you can be the sole superpower and still come apart at the seems. The only question left is how long it will take for the inevitable fall to occur. This can still be our finest hour- if we want it to be. Its still our choice- for now

For The Nonce———-PV