How should American Capitalism morph as a result of our current financial fiasco? This is an interesting query, but the inappropriate one. The better question is: What change will produce an overall, enduring, and superior result?
Many have dissected our economic system and pronounced its demise. American Capitalism as we have known it is dead, they say. Certainly, while in the midst of a tsunami, all become wet and soggy, convinced that whatever force produced such perfidious pain is due a disgraceful and permanent death.
At one level – and one only – I agree. That level is the lowest level, which presumably we are at or near given our current economic conditions.
But years from now, if we make foundational changes now to our financial ethos and culture, will we be better off?
I will not dispute that the negative manifestations of recent years show how human greed and motivation in a reasonably free enterprise can bring such terrible destruction.
But the true – and only meaningful – retroactive question will be: did the change we made produce at least the same amount of positive growth, innovation, initiative, and abundance that the American system had yielded up through 2008?
Think carefully about this. If the changes made reduced the negatives but also reduced the positives, we could easily become overall net losers. If we cannot answer the relevant question in the first paragraph, our actions should be much more restrained, not less.
I am not calling for an ostrich-like, stick-our-heads-in-the-ground option, but our economic way of life has produced so many advancements and affordable goods and services even after adjusting for inflation, that we must be overly judicious in analyzing the vicious viruses infecting us. As in medicine, some viruses cannot be killed. They merely run their courses.
We need to understand how best to address the shortfalls without hindering the system’s far more beneficial attributes. It is simply too easy to dismiss the latter and focus only on the former in times such as these.
Be very wary of those who proclaim American Capitalism to be dead. They may be dead wrong. And if they are, and they dramatically restructure our financial world, economy, and culture, we could learn too late that the cure was far worse than the disease.
It would be wrong not to learn from this crisis. But it would also be dead wrong to demagogue our circumstance and ignore the fact that our system produces far more good than evil even though it occasionally falls off the tracks and causes great temporary hardships.
No matter how we change our economic rules, we will never eradicate greed and selfishness. Those are our true and relentless enemies.
+++
Fred W. Apelquist, III
Approximately 445 words
© March 22, 2009
+++
YETMO: “You’re Entitled To My Opinion,” A Balanced Point of View
"To stimulate thought, debate, and introspection”