First, however, I must explain why I am placing less blame on corporate America as would be the appropriate response for a true liberal. More than any other sector of our society, the behavior of the business community is always clearly predictable. Privately held businesses usually have two overriding goals: to maximize their profits and to grow to a point where they can become publicly held corporations. Publicly held businesses (like those listed on the NYSE) have one goal: to increase the share-holder value of their common stock. Looking back at the behavior of both the industrial and financial sectors of our economy in the run-up to the Crash, these facts make the behavior of the entire business sector totally understandable. Ethics, morality, product quality, safety, and even national citizenship, always come in behind the primary responsibility of every CEO, which is to increase profits and drive up the price of the stock. Thus, businesses performed exactly as they should have, and they performed exactly as they did in the weeks and months preceding every economic down-turn in American history. And to drive home the point even more forcefully, after all the public hand-wringing and mea culpas in the theatrical Congressional hearings into the causes of the Crash, corporate America quickly returned to its pre 2008 behaviors. Corporations are not you and me, they don't care about people, they are solely focused on profitability, or they quickly cease being corporations. Just because five of nine Supreme Court Justices personified corporations in the Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, does not alter the fact that businesses are not living entities.
Without a doubt, the financial sector of our economy, in a binge of unbridled avarice, must shoulder some of the blame for the hardships visited on the bulk of the American people. But so what? Does anyone really believe there is such a thing as business ethics? If so, just look at the history of every industrialized nation and the misery that unregulated businesses rained down on their fellow citizens. That is what they do. Everything else is cosmetic window dressing for wishful and often naive consumers. Does anyone really believe that banks like us? Auto companies care more about our safety than their bottom line? Insurance companies are just like a good neighbor? Oil companies care about the environment? There is such a thing as "clean coal?" Need I go on?
At the turn of the 20th century here in the United States, the people had finally had enough of laissez-faire capitalism and demanded reforms from their governments. In 1904, progressive Republicans (now there is a catchy phrase, but that is what they were), and later progressive Democrats were swept into office and corporate American was called to task. One regulatory bill after another raced through the Congress and each was quickly signed into law by Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. By 1916, middle class Americans had consumer, environmental, and financial protection laws that were so successful, most are still with us today. And at every turn, big business screeched and howled that the American way of life was doomed. Does anyone besides the Congressional Paul family really want to go back to a world of no food and drug safety, no minimum wages, no child labor laws, no forty hour work-week, no workplace safety, and no consumer safety laws?
So why, you may ask am I blaming government for the economic crisis we now find ourselves struggling to get through? Sorry Tea Partiers, but it is not because our economy is over-regulated. Instead, the great miscalculation of our national government, going back to the Reagan era, was in its failure to remember the lessons of our history. Our economy may work best for the top one percent of us when it is entirely unregulated, but for all the rest of us that is a recipe for disaster. From 1980 until the crash of '08, both Democrats and Republicans bought into the Wall Street blather that an unregulated financial services market is really good for America. The resulting collapse stands alone as proof that that argument is as bankrupt today as it was in the Panics 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and the mega-crash of 1929. The rest of us have always prospered when government was there to limit the greed of our economic Brahmans, and we have always suffered when those limits have been removed.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives made a big deal in the first week of January about having a public reading of the US Constitution. Even though they selected out parts they found problematic (all references to slavery in the first seven articles), it would have served them well to have actually listened to the words they did recite. The Framers of the pinnacle of our entire legal system prefaced its text with a bold series of promises, collectively called The Preamble. All Americans were told that they could expect to be safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic. We were told that political liberty was being established for all of us upon the ratification of the document. And, we were told that under the Constitution, the new government would "promote the general welfare." There is no mention of the welfare of a select few being secured at the expense of everyone else. The general welfare means just that. Henceforth, the government of the United States was tasked to make certain that all of us might prosper, and thus we came to expect a minimum and reasonable standard of living for ourselves and for those who came after us. For over two hundred and twenty years, our society has been a work in progress where each generation of Americans was a little better off than the previous one. Should we now begin to move in the opposite direction? Or should we demand that our government lives up to the promises of the Founding Fathers who stated that the blessings, freedoms, and commitments within the Constitution would be there "for ourselves and our posterity?"
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