Do you share my irritation with the doomsday predictors who say things like the world will end at 2000 A.D., or else when the world will be convulsed by huge earthquakes and tsunamis starting May 21? They go so far as to rent billboards nationwide at considerable expense to broadcast their folly—and then never apologize when we survive the cataclysm. I wanted to rent a billboard to invite people to come to my church the day after doomsday.
How do you feel about the doomsters who forecasted that liberal government meddling would bring down the roof when the private industries of investment, banking and car manufacture almost threw us into the abyss? Darkly they predicted that lending—not giving—money to Detroit to see it through a world crisis would constitute malignant socialism, which means government ownership of industry. True to their economic Darwinism, the caliphs of capitalism, the wonderful wizards of Wall Street said it was actually better that the Big Three go under, if necessary, throwing hundreds of thousands out of work rather than have Big Brother interfere. (Ford declined the bailout.) Today they are as quiet as the Y2K crowd, aren’t they?
E.J. Dionne is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. He is also a Catholic whose writings approximate Catholic social doctrine about as well as does anyone’s I have seen. Recently he cited the prognostications of several high-placed politicos who have not retracted sayings like Rep. Dan Burton’s: “Having the federal government involved in every aspect of the private sector is very dangerous. In the long term, it could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country.” Or Rep. Lamar Smith, who called the bailout “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism.”
The bailout worked. Carmakers have returned to profitable quarters. They paid back or are paying back what they borrowed from Washington, at interest. Capitalists ought to be able to see the parallel between this and successful banking: lending money at interest for a profit. It is win-win. People go back to work making cars bought by people newly re-employed as the money fans out through the economy. At no time did the government take ownership of the companies, or seize the means of production, or nationalize what private investors had built up.
Carrying the allusions to Marxism a little farther, Lenin had a term for zealots who thought they were advancing the politburo’s agenda: useful idiots. They were outsiders who were in sympathy with the dictatorship of the proletariat but were in fact obstacles, only to be used when opportune. Do we have a similarity today with critics positively shouting for deregulation of private industry, as though that very thing (e.g., the 1999 bipartisan repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated back in 1933 the banks from the investment communities for everyone’s good) had not set free the great brokerage houses to generate fiendish devices like sub-par mortgage derivatives? This was private industry, deregulated and unharnessed, pulling the house down upon us all with insouciant greed.
If ever private industry needed careful regulation, it was Wall Street before the Great Recession. By now you would think this is evident to everyone. You would be wrong. Harping on the discredited theme that government is the epitome of all evil, that it has to be beaten back for the good of our liberties, non-billionaires by the score fill the op-ed pages with cries that their freedoms are being nibbled away, as though they had a dog in that fight. The billionaires deeply appreciate their zealous conservative associates for saying what they themselves cannot say. Yet the zealots gain only the satisfaction of resurrecting the “Don’t tread on me” battle cry, all in service of the biggies.
Dionne observes: “It’s axiomatic that government isn’t perfect and that we’re better off having a large private sector. It ought to be axiomatic that the private market isn’t perfect, either, and that we need government to step in when the market fails. The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign teach the same lesson: The era of antigovernment extremism is ending.”
Teenagers moan that they chafe under parental restraints like curfews and such. Wise parents know to expect and to counter the complaining. Unwise parents capitulate to the noise so they can be their son’s or daughter’s pal. Reasonable discipline, at home or in Washington, is what is best for us all.
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