The Cost of Our Selfishness....

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often
bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.

- Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States

One of your presidential candidates wants to take us back to an unspecified time to reclaim the greatness of our country.  As this narrative has played out, we have been exposed to and have exposed ourselves as still very much subscribers to and sufferers of many -isms.  We have seen far more racism and bigotry than in a long while.  We have seen great sexism, horrifying misogyny and mystifyingly sexualized male privilege.  We have been 'treated' to horrific religiocentrism, xenophobia and much more.

What we now know is that these lesser angels were always with us, but just as video has transformed our appreciation for the frequency and too frequent lethality in the relations between People of Color and many supposed officers of the law, so, too, has the media coverage - or, in the consideration of many, the media circus - opened our eyes to our true selves.  And the results of this national 'mirror test' are not pretty.

There are a number of facets of our national character that have been exposed as wanting, but I'd like to focus primarily on one of them (though they're intertwined).  I'd like to focus on the clear and dismaying rise of a shared sense of selfishness and what this has done and is doing to our polity.

A few years ago, one of our political leaders (who has since risen to become Speaker of our House of Representatives) revealed his being impressed by and adherence to the 'philosophy' of Ayn Rand.  For those of you not well versed in Objectivism or its supporting body of thought, let's just say that it's, well, intriguing.  According to William Thomas, in a post entitled "What is Objectivism?" and published on the Atlas Society website, it's a "philosophy as radical individualism" grounded in the concept of the "ideal man, the producer who lives by his own effort and does not give or receive the undeserved, who honors achievement and rejects envy."  Hmmm.

In part, this worldview was expounded in both Ms. Rand's fiction and non-fiction books, one of the latter of which was entitled The Virtue of Selfishness, as well as in her proselytizing via various groups that aligned with and/or were founded to spread her unique take on life and human existence.  Whatever one thinks of her philosophy, the record of Ms. Rand's life is enough of a contrast to make one question its premise: while advocating for the view that "an individual's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being," she used others - professionally and personally - to achieve her goals but most often in ways that were greatly injurious to them.  And in her last years she ended up living off of/being a recipient of the very governmental assistance that she had decried throughout her adult life.  Again, hmmm.

And why is Ayn Rand still relevant to us today?  Because her philosophy seems to undergird so much of the politics of one of our major parties and its nominee to be our leader.  And because, even beyond this, her worldview seems to be romantically fetishized by so many of our fellow citizens.  Simply put, we have enshrined selfishness and the concept of the interests of the individual as being above those of the collective in our culture ... and yet we seem surprised as to why we all can't get along.

Before I continue, let me disclaim my personal view on this, lest it be misconstrued:

I believe that individuals should pursue their self-interest in ways that are uniquely meaningful to them so long as this doesn't conflict with and constrain others from doing the same.  (Glad to discover that I've become a bit of a Libertarian at mid-life.)  This being said, however, it's clear to me that living synergistically is also and even more so in our interest: if we optimize our collective relations at the group level, there is a shared benefit that can be and typically is better than that which we can achieve on our own.  National and local defense, healthcare and public works (like parks, etc.) are just a few examples of such domains in which our coming together leaves us all better off.

And, economically speaking, I'm very much a capitalist at heart, but I've moved far beyond the laissez-faire variety that I was taught in college.  Now I'm more of a devotee of a 'Constrained Capitalism' in which a minimum level of life-sustaining support is provided to everyone - the socialist strain in my thinking, perhaps? - and a reasonable amount of regulation is enforced to insure that the interests of the many aren't infringed upon by the excessive profit motives of the few.  (One need only think back to the financial froth that led to the market collapse of 2008 and the resulting Great Recession to see how unrestrained capitalism can lead to enormous profits for a few with the costs of such recklessness shared by the many, though there are myriad other examples both historically and presently.)  In essence, ironically, my economic philosophy has evolved to be more MLK-like as I've aged, I suspect this being a reflection both of his wisdom, of my continued study of the man and his work and of my enlarged practical understanding of how the world works (versus the theories that I was taught so long ago).  This being said, my economic bent is not identical to Dr. King's, just far more similar to it than it was a few years ago.

So now let's return to Ms. Rand and the triumph of the selfishness that she championed:

If you listen closely to our political discourse now, there's a clear Us vs. Them trope playing out through multiple themes.  There are the 'Real Americans' who are (conservatively) patriotic and contributory to our society and the 'Takers' who want to redistribute our hard-earned freedom (read = money) to those less deserving.  And, of course, the derivation of these groups is a process of natural selection, so the resulting societal friction is therefore both authentic and rational, right?  Hmmm.

I'd like to focus on just three of the many manifestations of our selfishness before trying to draw some hypotheses (if not actual conclusions) about their (negative) impact.

The first manifestation of our selfishness is reflected in our tax policy in the past two generations.  In the 1970s, a second consecutive decade of major transition in our society, personal income tax rates ranged from 14% to 70% with a generous allowance for itemized deductions/approved exclusions so that effective tax rates were much lower (i.e., rarely exceeding 50% of AGI or Adjusted Gross Income).  Then along came the Reagan Revolution with its supply-side and trickle-down economic theories and our tax rates were lowered precipitously, especially for higher income earners.  From 1982 to 1985, the top tax rate was lowered to 50% and then in 1987 to 38.5% and then in 1988 to 28%.

So what's wrong with this, we might all ask?  What's wrong with not having the (federal) government take such a major share of our earnings?  In theory, nothing.  Except that we don't live in theory.

The reality of the 'Reagan 80s' is that the government didn't take in enough tax revenue - largely because it cut tax rates (too much) and increased spending (especially on the national defense) - so that the results were huge deficits that were funded by borrowing money in the capital markets for future generations to pay.  To put a finer point on it, to fund the last 30-year bond issued during this period, we taxpayers have been and still are paying investors a 9% interest rate until November, 2018.  (To put it in context, current long-term US Treasury security rates are approx. 2.6%.)  Think about this for a second, to fund the last Reagan-era deficit, money that we spent 28 years ago, we're still paying almost 3-1/2 times the current interest rate for another couple of years.  In other words, we haven't yet fully paid for the Reagan era deficits.  (That subsequent administrations have continued this historical practice since then - that, in fairness, President Reagan didn't start but amplified greatly - helps put this whole issue of deficits and federal finance in shocking perspective.)

So I'm sure that you appreciate the little foray into governmental finance, but, you, too, are probably asking why does this matter and how does it reflect increased and increasing selfishness in our society, right?  Here's why: because when we lower taxes on the few so much while increasing governmental spending, the resulting deficits not only imperil our national economic health but they limit our choices as a country ... for the many.  The few, with much more wealth, are largely insulated from the concerns and/or impacts that flow from inequitable tax (and spending) policy.

And if you're still not convinced, consider what happened twenty years later during the George W. Bush Administration: tax cuts for the wealthy and huge (war-driven) military spending resulted in huge federal budget deficits for which we'll be paying for another two decades.  Thankfully, under the Obama Administration, both the wars and the deficits have been scaled back significantly (but not entirely).  So, we - or, more correctly put, our children - will still be paying for Obama deficits, just not nearly as much as we've paid for the Reagan and Bush ones.  (And we'll just move on before exploring those Clinton-era surpluses won't we?)  So, under our tax policy in the past two generations, the rich have indeed gotten richer, but typically at the expense of the rest of us who have to pay for the deficits that their tax cuts generate.  That many in the working and middle classes voted aspirationally for these tax cuts that now hamstring their opportunities only makes the irony more cruel.

We could have made different choices, but we didn't ... and now we can't figure out why it's so hard for regular folk to enjoy the American Dream anymore.  Hmmm.

Let's turn next to the longstanding debate about government spending: you know, the old saw that our government is in the income redistribution business because it takes our hard-earned dollars in the form of taxes and then gives them foolishly to folks who are too lazy to work.  If this were true, certainly it would be a concern and possibly a reason to revolt.

The only problem is that it's not really true.  At most, the federal government spends 15% of its budget on "Safety Net" programs, according to the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities.  We certainly spend significantly more on national defense.  But even at 15%, the question remains whether we're being ripped off by so-called welfare queens and others who game the system, right?

Nope.  The apocryphal welfare queen conjured by President Reagan was actually a figment, but even searching for someone like her at the time turned up a skilled Chicago-area welfare abuser who just happened to be white.  Funny, but that 'urban' (read = African-American) association was just dog whistle politics at its most effective (and therefore shameful).  Do some folks on the so-called welfare rolls game the system?  Sure.  A significant percentage of them?  Not at all.

Who are the real beneficiaries of federal welfare programs?  Children.  Sadly, tragically (very) poor children.  In fact, some estimates put the percentage of American children receiving some sort of government assistance at almost 40%.  And lest you think that we're paying their baby-making mothers (or, supposedly, in rare instances, parents) to stay home and have more of them, be aware that the average food stamp (SNAP) monthly benefit is approx. $400 (or less than $100 per week, according to cheatsheet.com).  Can you feed your family on $400 per month?  Neither can most SNAP families.

And working class families: a recent University of California at Berkeley pointed out that "the majority of  households receiving government assistance are headed by a working adult."  In fact, "The study found that 56% of federal and state dollars spent between 2009 and 2011 on welfare programs ... flowed to working families and individuals with jobs," according to that lefty rag The Wall Street Journal.

So it turns out that most welfare recipients are just poor folks not earning enough at their menial jobs to support their families, not freeloaders sucking the rest of us dry.  But we don't here much of this from our elected 'leaders' on either side of the aisle.  (My own surmise is that the Democrats, as usual, are too scared to mention it and the Republicans are to craven to do so because they know that it contradicts the false narrative that they've been peddling for decades.  But I digress....)

And yet our politics is infected with a venal strain of needing always to cut our 'largesse' to the least of these because it's sapping their initiative (while, cynically and paradoxically, paired with a demand that we cut the tax burden of the rich for the same reason [i.e., because it's making it too hard for them to get that way or to stay that way or whatever the excuse is at the time...]).  Some of our political leaders seem to experience a good deal of glee in demonizing the poor among us, which, for a country that's supposedly heavily populated by Christians, seems antithetical to our Patron's example, at least to me.  (But, again, I digress....)

What any thoughtful assessment of our governmental spending reveals is that we are not going broke - at least in the short term - because we spend too much on the poor.  This may not always be the case, however, because since we choose not to invest in providing them decent incomes, educations, healthcare, etc., eventually their choices in life tend to cost us even more.  For example, as much as we don't want to 'give' the poor medical coverage because they haven't 'earned it,' it turns out that, before the Affordable Care Act, treating them as indigents in the emergency rooms of our hospitals was becoming unsustainably costly.   As an expert once noted, we're going to "pay either way," so it makes sense to pay in ways that are preventative rather than reactionary (not because we've all of a sudden decided to care for the poor just that being smart about doing so costs us less...).

Where's the selfishness in this, you might ask?  First, it's in the invariably negative judgment of the poor and the imputation of negative character and other traits to them because of their economic status.  In the "Land of the Free," anybody who's not a deadbeat or a reprobate can be rich, or, at least, middle class, right?  (If you honestly believe this, you are definitely part of the problem.)  And, second, it's in the willingness to be uninformed as long as you don't think that it's at your expense.  That Republican elites - or, if you prefer a less partisan but no less accurate descriptor, the rich - have gotten their poorer fellow citizens to vote for the policies that often disenfranchise them is one of the most brilliant political strategic victories in our history and thus one of the most truly deplorable realities in our society.  That the rich exploit the poor (in the latter's ignorance) for their own gain - and cry "class warfare!" when anyone dares to question the structures and/or policies that accomplish this - is both craven and selfish ... but also par for the course in modern America.

Lastly, let's consider our current political climate and the election season from hell that has to end in ten days (right?!?).  We hear a lot from the two major party candidates about economic and social policies designed to help the middle class (and, on one side of the aisle, doing so via that tried and true approach of advantaging the rich even more so that some of this trickles down to the middle class as well), but we hear virtually nothing about our poor and working class fellow citizens' plight and what we can and will do to address this.

Don't get me wrong, one candidate is very much stoking the alienation of a certain segment of the dispossessed to great political effect, but as far as I can tell, other than promises to bring jobs back to this country in (unexplained) contradiction to the now decades-long reality of globalization that has taken them away and will keep them so, I haven't heard any actual policy proposals to benefit the working class and poor.  Instead, these alienated masses - who have suffered greatly from the political choices made by folks that they've elected and re-elected continually that have disproportionately favored those who have capital over those who contribute labor - are being told to look at The Others among us - like Mexicans (who are criminals and rapists in large part and perhaps some are OK) and African-Americans (whose inner-city lives are hell) and Muslims (who should be banned), etc. - and to realize that they are the reason that you (white, working and middle class folk) are being held back because, you know, of their criminality and their disproportionate slopping at the public welfare trough and... (you get the picture).

And the other candidate is speaking almost exclusively of the middle class and pretty much avoiding a discussion of the working and non-working poor.  (In part, no doubt, because one of her husband's failures as president was to 'reform' the welfare system in ways that demonized the poor and made them worse off so that the socialized cost of their misery actually increased.  But, again, and with apologies, I digress....)  Yes, we could be stronger together, but neglecting the least of these among us because they don't vote and showing compassion for them is taken as a sign of political weakness in our toxic environment is an abdication of leadership, not proof of its shrewdness.

Ignorance is costly, especially when paired with selfishness.  (And when this concoction is mixed with many of the -isms that still very much plague our society - and, thanks to an candidate who seems to embody them all are now much more obvious - it's literally life-threatening.)

You don't have to have a PhD in economics to realize that globalization is real and here to stay, so "bringing back jobs" is a fantasy, since the loss of the jobs in the first place reflects the hard reality that labor in developed countries is far more/too much more costly and, by comparison, labor in the developing world is so incredibly/too cheap (even adjusted for productivity) for capitalists to pass up, so the owners of the companies whose bottom lines are fattened by cheaper foreign labor are going to keep exporting those jobs.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that illegal immigrants aren't more but less crime-prone than the rest of us.  Or that no Democratic president has ever actually tried to take away people's guns en masse.  Or that ninth-month abortions aren't really a thing nor ever have been.  Even the dispossessed have access to Google and could look these things up.

But they don't, because being told that it's not your fault sounds an awful lot better than "Sorry you voted for a bunch of stuff that's killing you now, but maybe you should educate yourself and be smarter about your self-interest going forward," which is about all the Republicans can say.  And it's also sounds better than the Democrats' seeming silence, too.

And when you're willing to buy into the false notion that life and that uniquely nationally cherished variant of it, the American Dream, are zero-sum games, then you end up losing, especially when you elect representatives who vote for policies that benefit the few over the many (and, to remind the average American, you're in this latter group).  And you keep re-electing them.

The reasons for the alienation of a large segment of the American populace are largely real and true:  The game is rigged against them, not because they're largely white but because they're working and middle class folks who vote for policies that disenfranchise them time and again.  Every time a Republican president or Congress floats a new tax proposal, their tax rates are at best marginally lowered but their rich neighbors' burdens are massively lightened and the resulting deficits are paid for by them and their - the middle and working class folks' - children.

Every time we weaken the Department of Education - usually under the guise of holding teachers accountable or some other political ruse - we pay for this long-term.  Our taxes don't really go down - the cut education funding invariably ends up in another part of the federal budget - but we also don't invest in our children's education and thus our own future prosperity.  That our educational attainment continues to ebb internationally is a truly frightening reality because it suggests that our children and grandchildren will be less competitive economically and otherwise in the long term.

And yet we defend our own and our children's resulting ignorance and, in many cases, take pride in it.  As Isaac Asimov observed some years ago, there is a growing strain of anti-intellectualism in our society that is "based on the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

But, of course, this isn't true, because our ignorance is tremendously costly.  Maybe former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's putative ban on sodas larger than 16 ounces was a bit of a reach, but the sanctimonious blowback was indicative of just how profound our (false) pride is: many New Yorkers and others across the country with profound reacted indignation to having their freedom (read = sugary drink options) limited.  Why, to them, it was a fundamental American right to consume mass quantities of drinks that contribute meaningfully to our national epidemic of obesity.  And who's supposed to pay the significantly larger healthcare costs for our obese fellow citizens?  The rest of us, of course.

And I'm OK without the soda ban, but I'm not OK with the lack of acknowledgement that dealing with individual choices that lead to obesity becomes a socialized cost that the rest of us end up paying, too.  One of the great things about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare, is that it precludes an insurer from refusing care to someone with a pre-existing condition.  An unintended consequence of this is that many people's individual choices, which include various 'voluntary' conditions like obesity, will be paid for, in part, by others.  So, being able to obtain healthcare at what is in effect a subsidized rate encourages obesity in the short run (though we can hope that, longer term, access to care will encourage healthier behaviors as the insured are better educated about the true costs - individual and collective - of their choices).

The point is that the collective popular revolt against the soda ban reflects a selfishness that is, in many guises, undermining our polity.  So, too, does our anger and antipathy for other 'regular folks' like us who don't make the rules in our society but live by them like the rest of us do.  Immigrants aren't taking our jobs, they're either doing jobs that we won't do - is there a groundswell from 'regular Americans' to be agricultural workers who can't get jobs in the fields picking our fruit and vegetables? - or employers, seeking to pay less/the least for a service/labor so that their own profits are larger, are hiring them instead of fellow citizens.  Is the latter the immigrants' fault?  Of course not ... but it's a lot easier to demonize them than our bosses who're disintermediating us.

And do we not see the parallel between immigrant employment here and the exporting of jobs to other countries?  They are both driven by the same cause: the profit motive.  Immigrants can't hire themselves, they have to be hired ... so the people causing the 'problem' are the ones doing the hiring, not those being hired.  So, too, jobs don't export themselves, they have to be relocated overseas ... so the people causing the 'problem' are the ones doing the relocation, not those receiving the jobs in new locales.  In both cases, the motive is money and the desire for those in positions of (hiring) power to have more of it.  But in our politics, the theme is xenophobic (and thus selfish): it's those Others who're at fault, not the folks 'like us' who hire them.

(And, no, I'm not suggesting that employers shouldn't seek to hire the cheapest but sufficiently skilled labor possible to create their products and/or provide their services - though, in the long run, this may underdevelop the potential for their business - just that the reasons that they do are systemic and endemic to our chosen economic model.  As basic economic theory has told us for years, capital will always seek the cheapest labor possible because this leads to larger margins and profits in the short run, so for us to pretend otherwise is either patently absurd or willfully ignorant.)

This phenomenon of selfishness can be summed up by the theme of a popular meme on FaceBook.  In this apochryphal scenario, a banker, a worker and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies.  The banker then takes 19 of the cookies and suggests to the worker that the immigrant is about to take his cookie.  The first part of the irony, of course, is such 'benevolence' obscures the real crime, the banker taking the vast majority of the bakery bounty; and the second and far sadder part is that it also obscures the scenario-based reality that the worker and immigrant are both stuck trying to get a minimal share of the otherwise appreciable opportunity.

So, too, with our society now: we're more focused on whether domestics or immigrants are getting that last cookie than asking ourselves why we'd structure society so that the banker can take the 19 in the first place.  And that the proverbial workers have voted for 'leaders' who've created this warped system that disenfranchises them makes it all the more tragic.  So, yes, I understand the cries of the disaffected, but I abhor their failure to acknowledge their own culpability for it and then their compound error in attacking others like them rather than the powerful who constrained their opportunities in the first place.

Only when we first realize that, as MLK noted, we are cloaked in a single garment of destiny, and, second, that we have the power to structure our society more equitably and inclusively but only if we overcome superficial divisions that have been used to keep the masses separated and down for centuries.  This will take us looking across the common table at others who are somewhat different than us - still human beings/Children of God, but with different histories/backgrounds, cultures and God-given/immutable superficial features - and seeing in them what we typically see in ourselves: people of positive intent.  Further, it will require us to seek access to opportunities in a way that allows for shared progress, not just the triumph of one group over another fighting for that last cookie when our shared focus should be the nineteen other ones.  And it will require, in this land still dominated my nominal Christians (but increasingly less so in the years to come), that we actually follow the Patron's "new commandment" to love our neighbors as ourselves.

When we actually realize that we're all better off when a rising tide raises all boats and act accordingly in our public life/society, then we'll overcome the selfishness that divides us.  If we fail to do this, however, God help us as the costs of our selfishness continue to rise and the gains therefrom continue to inure to a small set of fellow citizens who don't have to be and aren't concerned about the rest of us except every few years when they need our votes to keep them in power....

The world is so competitive, aggressive, consumive, selfish

and during the time we spend here we must be all but that.

- Jose Mourinho