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Out of the Mouths of Pundits

Peggy Noonan had a column a day or so ago in the Wall Street Journal in which she methodically detailed the ineptitude of the Romney campaign, and mused about what it might take to get that effort back on track. Much of what she had to say was familiar, conventional campaign wisdom to those of us who’ve spent lots of time in and around political contests, but it was her next-to-last paragraph that really struck me. Noonan wrote:

A campaign is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: victory.

That is demonstrably true–and not just true about political campaigns, but about the country’s political and social life. That said, it is a truth that has become, more or less explicitly, the hotly contested framework of this Presidential race.

Although the GOP took the President’s “you didn’t build that” remark out of context, Romney and the Republicans have made disagreement with what he actually did say the central theme of their message.

The President (and Elizabeth Warren, and others running for office this cycle) insist that “we are all in this together,” that citizens depend upon each other and our common institutions in myriad ways, large and small. The businessperson who succeeds deserves respect and admiration for his diligence and enterprise, but we also need to recognize the enabling role played by government: Mr. Successful ships his goods on roads provided by the taxpayer; he depends for security on police and firefighters supported by our taxes; he hires workers trained in our public schools. Ms. Businessperson sells those goods in markets that would not exist but for a legal and economic infrastructure that creates the rules and stability without  which people do not have the confidence–or often the wherewithal–to consume. (People in third world countries are not inherently less entrepreneurial, but even if they create a better mousetrap, there are few people able to buy it.)

Recognizing the importance of social infrastructure does not diminish the value of success or hard work, as the Romney campaign has charged. To the contrary, it is the refusal to recognize our essential interconnectedness and interdependence that is not only arrogant, but dangerous and short-sighted.

The GOP’s chosen message has been “it’s all about us, the job creators. There are makers and takers, and we are the makers. And we did it all by ourselves.”

The Democratic message this cycle (with apologies to Ms. Noonan) has been “A country is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: a fair shake for everyone.”

As the President said at the Democratic Convention, it’s about citizenship.

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A Different Kind of Economic “Bubble”

In my Media and Public Policy class last week we were discussing the ways in which the Internet has given us the ability to live in “reality bubbles” of our own choosing, when an older student made a perceptive observation. She pointed out that when she grew up in Martinsville, she’d been surrounded by a “bubble” of bigotry–she’d lived in a small community of homogeneous people who all thought alike. In her case, the Internet had provided an escape from the bubble.

We all live in bubbles of one kind or another, and that ability to isolate ourselves from those with whom we do not share geography, religion, common interests and experiences can stunt our human empathy. When our distance from each other becomes too great, civility and self-government suffer.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel-winning economist, and he has just written a book called The Price of Inequality, examining the effects of  the currently huge divide between the rich and everyone else on our ability to sustain a democratic government.

He isn’t sanguine.

According to Stiglitz, the vaunted American market is broken. It has been overwhelmed by politically engineered market advantages—special deals that economists call “rent-seeking.” The term refers to politically-achieved “exemptions” from the market that allow certain individuals to reap economic returns above normal market levels– profits derived from favorable political treatment rather than competitive success.

In The Price of Inequality, Stiglitz chronicles these blatant tax and spending giveaways–the special deals and corporate welfare enjoyed by big agriculture, big energy, and many, many others.

Stiglitz also argues that much of the rent-seeking that plagues our economy takes a more subtle form. In many cases, the production of a product produces what economists call “negative externalities.” These are costs that are incurred during the manufacturing or development process that end up being imposed on society rather than paid for by the producer and included in the price of the goods or services involved. The most commonly cited example would be a manufacturer who discharges his waste into a nearby waterway rather than properly disposing of it, shifting the costs of cleanup and disposal to others. Society pays for the pollution, and that cost is not included in the market price of the manufactured goods.

The bottom line is that markets don’t operate properly when some participants are in a position to game the system, and societies don’t operate properly when markets are rigged.

As he points out, one of the consequences to society is that when those at the top–the 1%–enjoy the best health care, education, and other benefits that come with greater wealth, they fail to realize that “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

They live in a bubble.

Our Deteriorating Public Services

I’m officially pissed.

The rant I’m about to embark upon was triggered by the City’s recycling contractor, Republic, which–for the third straight time–picked up everyone’s recycling except ours. We’ve had plenty of reasons to be less than enamored of the recycling program, which charges extra for the service (thus incentivizing environmentally irresponsible behavior). My biggest gripe has been the refusal of Republic to come down the alley, as our regular garbage pick-up does. Since we live in the city–the “hood”–that means we have to schlep our container down one alley, then another, in order to get it to the street. Not only is this inconvenient for elderly folks (and we’re pretty elderly!), it means that the street looks cluttered and trashy for two or three days, while cans are taken out and then returned to garages.

It isn’t just recycling. Regular trash pickup has gotten hit-or-miss of late. Crime in our neighborhood has increased to a worrisome degree–initially, the increase was mostly petty thefts, or cars being broken into, but more recently, people have been mugged and homes invaded while the occupants were still there. Scary stuff that we haven’t previously experienced.

When apartments being built a couple of blocks from our house caught fire a couple of months ago, it took IFD what seemed like a long time to arrive. That may have been an incorrect impression, but several people in the neighborhood reported a discomfiting wait between their 911 calls and the first truck. In those minutes, the blaze became a huge conflagration (we could feel the heat on our front porch, which is a good two and a half blocks away, and the flames could be seen for miles).

Not far from where that fire raged is a city park that–despite repeated promises–continues to shows signs of neglect. It has a very nice pool, but the hours of operation have been sharply cut back since it first opened.

It’s hard to remember that during the Hudnut Administration, streets in the Mile Square were swept every day. Now, from the looks of it, they aren’t being swept at all.

Part of the problem is management. Construction and especially street repairs drag on for weeks more than necessary (and let’s not even talk about the Cultural Trail segments that kept parts of Mass Avenue and Virginia Avenue closed for months on end while little or no work got done). Accountability for garbage collection is a management issue. But the major culprit is lack of money. So we have too few police, too few lifeguards, too few managers generally.

It’s bad enough that we’ve starved local government; it’s worse that we’ve actually built that starvation diet into our state constitution. Indiana taxpayers have spoken, and what they’ve said is that they don’t care enough about the quality of public services to pay for those services.

Unfortunately, we get what we pay for.

One of the unintended consequences of a city with inadequate public services and a deteriorating quality of life is that the people who can, leave.  And they take their tax dollars with them, triggering a cycle of further decline.

We aren’t there yet, but the signs are ominous.

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Different Worldviews

The party’s conventions are over, and if there is one thing they showed us, it’s that Democrats and Republicans live in very different realities (as the President noted in his speech, Democrats understand that climate change is not a hoax) and have starkly different approaches to the age-old question: how should we live together?

From the composition of the crowds to the policies offered by the speakers, Americans saw two very different messages. It wasn’t simply that–as the President memorably noted–the GOP’s prescription for everything and anything that ails us is “Take two tax cuts and call me in the morning.” It was the difference between a longing for the past–for an America that only existed, if it existed at all, for a small group of middle-class white guys–and a determination to build a fairer, more inclusive, more stable future.

That difference in focus goes a long way toward explaining why the GOP has so much more party discipline than the Democrats do. When you are focused on defeating the other guys because you believe that will magically reinstate a time when women knew their place, gays were hiding in the closet where they belonged, immigrants picked the crops and then went home (or at least stayed out of sight), and black people did not occupy statehouses and most definitely did not live in the White House, the goal is clear and cohesion around that goal relatively easy.

When you are trying to cope with real problems, trying to come to agreement about the future you are trying to build, rather than focusing solely on the man and party you are trying to defeat, the conversation is different. There are many more areas of disagreement–where, precisely, do we want to go? What are the policies most likely to get us there?

Despite the Tea Party’s insistence that Obama is a socialist, what was striking about the rhetoric coming from the Democratic convention was its full-throated endorsement of market economics, of the meritocratic vision that used to be a Republican vision before the party was captured by its anti-rationalist extreme. That affirmation of an economics that rewards hard work and innovation differed from the  exaltation of wealth we saw at the Republican convention, however, because it was situated in a larger concept of citizenship and mutual obligation.

The President said it clearly.  “We also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.”

In November, we’ll see which worldview American voters endorse.

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