As our Congress-Critters squabble over executive pay, recklessness, greed and the American Way, the media keeps pumping up the music in the side show. Our President says that this is about fundamentals, virtue, values, but has failed to control the Vandals on Wall Street through his moral authority alone. And in all of this, at the heart of all the sound and fury is vanity. In all of this, the sanctity of contract has overwhelmed the sanctity of human life.
As we spend billions on bailing out a legal fiction, read AIG, millions of actual Americans are losing their homes, have insufficient food, can't afford to heat their homes if they have them, and have been denied the dignity of having our voices heard. While we may be outraged over millions in bonuses, we have collectively lost focus on what matters. In our attempt to save corporations and the tangled web of obligations they have rigged, we are forgetting our obligations to actual people who have been affected by the corporations failings.
We need to change the dialogue. We need everyone to ask "Is this necessary, or just vanity?" Does this system provide for the needs of all people, or merely placate the outrageous egos of those in power? This is not to say we must ditch all of these corporations, capital ventures, and government institutions, but rather that we must weigh them against a more realistic metric.
Until we provide for every American with:
- Quality Food
- Respectable and Comfortable Shelter
- Health in Body and Environment
- An Opportunity to Participate
all else is vanity. Why do we continue to neglect the well-being of our most fundamental assets, our fellow citizens? Corporations are without
compassion, that faculty most critical for wise governance, so why to we continue to rely upon them to provide for our basic needs? It is not as if the Federal Government doesn't already spend vastly greater than would be necessary to meet our basic needs:
- Food - Individual share in a CSA $400 / year x 300 million americans = $120,000,000,000, less than what we gave to AIG
- Shelter - Prefab individual home ~ $40,000 amortized over 30 years x 300 million americans = $12,000,000,000,000 / 30 = $400,000,000 / year, $94 Billion less than we will spend on the Military this year!
- Health Care - $2500 per person as per every other Industrialized nation = $750,000,000,000, which is only slightly higher than the $624 billion the federal and state governments currently spend on Medicaid and Medicare
- Opportunity - Education, Small Business Loans, Research & Development, The Arts - all easily fundable by shifting existing tax breaks and incentives from big companies to small!
The Federal Budget has finally reached a point where it can easily provide every single American with their fundamental necessities. Further more, it can go even one better, and encourage entrepreneurship and innovation by promoting small business, education, and research over entrenched interests. So why are we still acting as if we live in an inevitable state of scarcity? Why do we allow our leaders to fail to meet their moral obligation to create a society that provides independence for all individuals? Is not the goal of every liberal democracy to minimize dependency, so as to prevent the corruption of the res publica?
It is time for a new dialogue, and we must ask these tough questions of our representatives. We must solve the fundamental problems of our society, and realize the promise of the American Dream. How much more productive would our public discourse be, if every American were free to participate to the best of their ability? How much more prosperity could we create if every person with a good idea, had a change to realize it? And how can we continue to provide sustenance to legal fictions, while failing to feed and house our neighbors and countrymen?