Sustainable Economics
A friend asked me to respond to this piece about the Occupy Movement and its activity re: home foreclosures.
Yes, there was gross corporate malfeasance in home mortgage lending that led to the crash of 2008 and the ongoing meltdown, and yes, it was orchestrated by the people at the very top of the food chain, who knew from the start that they would come away with billions of dollars at the expense of the commoners. The wealthiest, smartest, and most ruthless preyed on those least able to defend themselves — again — then walked away scott-free, and now lay in wait to pull off the next crime of the century.
But don’t the people who invested in homes they couldn’t afford have responsibility here too? Growing up unable to do basic math or to think for oneself isn’t exactly a virtue. And what exactly happened to caveat emptor?
Forgive me; I was born with the curse of seeing both sides to a story.
Take the old story of labor and management; though diminished in strength, organized labor has come through the entirety of the 20th Century and lives with us today. People regard it as a necessary evil; labor unions have their own corrupt elements, and would not have been forced into existence had it not been for the cruelties exerted by the most powerful against the weakest.
I repeat: organized labor certainly isn’t exactly a shining star in our society. For example, our world in the West is falling apart largely because of the failure of education, but it’s clear that the quality of our schools would be better without the teachers’ and administrators’ unions.
What will be the result of the ever-deepening divide between rich and poor — the constant erosion of the middle class? Will the ueber-rich Americans be happier living in a country dominated by an uneducated underclass, a country that has long since been marginalized, unable to compete in global commerce? I doubt it; I think they’re in the process of creating their own misery. In particular, the chain of events they have set off seems to be a world that could soon implode upon itself. But even if it doesn’t implode, it’s unclear how happy any of us, rich or poor, could possibly be in such a circumstance. Have you ever been to Jamaica or any of its many dozens of island cousins around the world, and tried to have a good time in a place in which 99% of the people around you were suffering? For all of us born with a conscience, being surrounded by poverty and despair puts a distinct pall on the occasion.
There truly are two sides to the story. There’s a good feeling to the invisible hand of unregulated free-market capitalism, but unfortunately it holds the seeds of its own destruction.
