Fetishizing Self Reliance

I want to start out this post by saying very clearly that I believe in the principle of meeting our own needs whenever possible, especially so we can be in a better position to provide assistance to others. Providing for ourselves, living within our means, all of it. It's personally satisfying, and it's good citizenship. Both of my jobs involve helping people get to a place of self reliance.

But I wonder if the value we place on self reliance is causing us to lose important perspective. Too many voices I hear are becoming more judgmental and less charitable. And they are getting louder.

The other day I was talking with someone who represents a private religious charity that provides temporary aid for people who have no place to go (a few nights of shelter, a change of clothes, a bus token). He mentioned that they'd discovered a particular client had managed to get help from several of their offices to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of dollars. What should they do with clients like him? Clients who are becoming dependent?

Turns out I've met the particular client he was referring to. He's a man who has brain damage from being shot in the head twice.

He is becoming dependent!? That is the main concern?

When on earth did Jesus ever say to give to the poor unless, of course, you are concerned that they are becoming dependent?

Heaven help us!

We Delude Ourselves

Four years ago I had a student in my freshman composition course who focused his research on answering the question of whether the United States has been justified in its military actions over the past 20 or 30 years.

He looked into some of the major or most well known conflicts (Bosnia, Somalia, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq) and concluded that each decision to engage was worth the cost in blood and treasure.

I didn't push back like I might have under other circumstances. In this case, he had enlisted in the military himself and wanted to be sure he was doing something he could believe in. I still wonder if I made the right choice about that.

The truth is I don't believe the U.S. has been justified in all of its military actions over the years. Of course, we should defend ourselves. But we seem to have stretched the meaning of the word defend pretty darn thin.

Preemptive war to stop Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. Protecting against the theoretical falling of theoretical communist dominoes. Protecting business interests in the middle east and Latin America.

Killing innocents and risking the lives of soldier surrogates to protect the profits of a small percentage of people is not even remotely the moral equivalent of protecting our homes and families.

Around and Around

I once had a neighbor say to me when her unemployment benefits ran out, “Oh, well, my vacation is over and now I must go find a job."

Because there are people who milk our safety net, does that mean I think the system shouldn’t exist?

No, I don’t.

Of course, we should always seek ways to make the bureaucracy more effective and cost efficient. And we should never lose sight of helping people stand on their own feet whenever possible. But in far more cases than not, the safety net meets real needs--needs that often exist because capitalism has some pretty sharp edges. It’s nice to think that only the people who take the risks with their capital are the ones who will suffer if they miscalculate. But they aren’t.

I once went in to my job at a computer software company an hour late because I had a doctor’s appointment and discovered that my boss and my entire staff of six had been laid off while I was gone.

Because there are companies that fail to plan perfectly and use layoffs as a management tool to make their short-term bottom lines look better to shareholders, do I think we should prevent them from ever laying anyone off?

No, I don’t.

Companies need flexibility to cut their operating costs in order to stay in the game.

I once saw a company that had been in my family for two generations permanently shut down during a recession due in part to union demands that were entrenched and inflexible.

Because unions sometimes fight for a level of worker benefits and protections that ultimately compromise an entire enterprise, do I think we should abolish them?

No, I don’t.

Can you imagine a society in which the right to organize and stand up to tyranny--whether public or private--didn’t exist? It’s not hard. There are plenty of examples.

I once got called into my new boss’s office the day after my old boss and my entire staff had been laid off. She was looking for assurance that I would still be able to meet all of the deadlines the following month. My job was on the line. At first I gave it a shot, but I recognized very quickly that it would break me. I was blessed to have resources that enabled me to walk away. Many people don’t have that luxury. Many people end up broken.

What do I make of all this?

The public sector has strengths and flaws. The private sector has strengths and flaws. Any organization that exists for any reason has strengths and flaws. Every single individual has strengths and flaws.

What we need to do when we problem solve is to find that balancing point at which strengths are relatively maximized and flaws are relatively minimized. But that requires real discourse in which everyone acknowledges not just the strengths but also the weaknesses of their proposed solutions, their ideologies, and the people and organizations they represent.

We could kick some serious problems in the butt if we did that.

Of Good Conscience

A friend of mine posted this on facebook today. She's an unabashed follower of Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Breitbart, etc.

This is what I posted in response. I'm usually not this brave.

"You're right. I need to speak up. You ready? I think Dinesh D'Souza's theories about Obama's 'rage' are based on poor logic, drawing the flimsiest of conclusions from twisted facts. Over the past five years, Obama's opponents have sucked people into believing a thoroughly fabricated version of who Obama is, including far too many people I love and otherwise respect. Frankly, it's disconcerting and bewildering.

"Disagree with his center-left policies. Fine. Criticize him because our economy isn't growing fast enough for our taste, ignoring the fact that by the end of 2008 we were in free fall and our economy is now stabilized and moving in the right direction (while many other developed economies are still reeling). Fine. Don't vote for him. Fine.

"But he is not even remotely a far-left radical with an anti-business, anti-American agenda. Trust me. I know a surprising number of far-left radicals and they don't believe he is one of them. Hell, even the health care reform he pushed for had its genesis in proposals made by Republicans during the Clinton years and the conservative Heritage Foundation (both the mandate and the exchanges).

"I sure hope if he is re-elected, our good citizens will take a deep breath. But I'm afraid the hatred of a man that doesn't even exist runs too deep for that."

I get Orwell on a whole new and frightening level.

Hollowing Out

One of the things I've been observing about our society is that we are hollowing ourselves out. It's more than just a matter of prioritizing appearance over substance, though that is a big part of it. I may explore this idea more in future posts because I see this happening in so many facets of our lives--communication, problem solving, product design, education, religion, architecture. Everywhere, really.

Here's a piece of it related to the hollowing out of our economy that I came across in this article adapted from Joseph Steiglitz' The Price of Inequality.

The word "rent" was originally used, and still is, to describe what someone received for the use of a piece of his land . . . The term "rent" was eventually extended to include monopoly profits . . . In time, the meaning was expanded still further to include the returns on other kinds of ownership claims. If the government gave a company the exclusive right to import a certain amount of a certain good, such as sugar, then the extra return was called a "quota rent." The acquisition of rights ot mine or drill produces a form of rent. So does preferential tax treatment for special interests . . .

The magnitude of "rent seeking" in our economy, while hard to quantify, is clearly enormous. Individuals and corporations that excel at rent seeking are handsomely rewarded. The financial industry, which now largely functions as a market in speculation rather than a tool for promoting economic productivity, is the rent-seeking sector par excellence. Rent seeking goes beyond speculation. The financial sector also gets rents out of its domination of the means of payment--the exorbitant credit- and debit-card fees and also the less well-known fees charged to merchants and passed on, eventually, to consumers . . . 

In recent years, the financial sector has accounted for some 40 percent of all corporate profits. This does not mean that its social contribution sneaks into the plus column, or comes even close. The crisis showed how it could wreak havoc on the economy. In a rent-seeking economy such as ours has become, private returns and social returns are badly out of whack . . .Rent seeking makes nothing grow. Efforts are directed toward getting a larger share of the pie rather than increasing the size of the pie. But it's worse than that: rent seeking distorts resource allocations and makes the economy weaker. It is a centripetal force: the rewards of rent seeking become so outsize that more and more energy is directed toward it, at the expense of everything else.

Later in the article, Steiglitz actually refers to a hollowing out, referring to issues with the wage structure in the Soviet economy before it collapsed and what we can learn from it.

The widespread sense by workers in the Soviet Union that they were being mistreated in exactly this way--exploited by managers who lived high on the hog--played a major role in the hollowing out of the Soviet economy, and in its ultimate collapse. As the old Soviet joke had it, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

Patriotism?

It does feel this way sometimes. A lot of times.

Reinventing Robin Hood

My son and I have been reading the original Robin Hood from time to time (it's a bit of a rough read aloud for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the level of bawdiness!).

Early in the book I discovered that the whole "taking from the rich to give to the poor" sense of Robin Hood that we all grew up with has been seriously distorted. Robin Hood was really all about returning to the poor who had been exploited what was rightfully theirs.

So, in all that year, fivescore or more good stout yoemen gathered about Robin Hood, and chose him to be their leader and their chief. Then they vowed that even as they themselves had been despoiled they would despoil their oppressors, whether baron, abbot, knight, or squire, and that from each they would take that which had been wrung from the poor by unjust taxes, or land rents, or wrongful fines; but to the poor folk they would give a helping hand in need or trouble, and would return to them that which had been unjustly taken from them.

Not that I'd recommend we go about dealing with things the way Robin Hood and his band of men did, but we've got companies making record profits, productivity levels are at all time highs, and wages are stagnating. The average worker is losing ground in our society, and a society that has the kind of extreme inequality we've been trending toward ends up ripe for unrest or worse.

I certainly don't advocate for equal outcomes--some inequality can be motivating. But I do advocate for a more balanced economy and a fairer playing field--extreme inequality is demoralizing and destabilizing.

We've got large and growing segments of our society that work their fingers to the bone and have very little to show for it (in some cases, why wouldn't they opt for welfare?). In the meantime, our cost of living goes up and up (cities have minimum lot sizes and minimum square foot requirements for homes, access to technology is increasingly essential, etc.), pushing more and more people to the margins. They have to take on two or three jobs just to make ends meet, never mind get ahead!

Something's got to change. And we're either going to be ahead of it--making conscious, constructive choices--or we're going to be paying for it in painful ways. Far more painful ways than dealing with union negotiations or with a measly 3.5% marginal tax increase, up from the lowest tax rates in my lifetime.

Broken Stones

Came across this article the other day: "Debtors' Prison for Failure to Pay for Your Own Trial." The key quote:

Criminal justice debt drags people further away from reintegration with civil society. A person's life can spiral out of their control when interest, late fees, revocation of a driver's license and ineligibility for public assistance, mean that unpaid criminal justice debt snowballs. You can't get blood from a stone but if you try, you can break the stone.

In the past year and a half I've met many broken stones.

I've been surprised to learn how many inmates at the county jail are there for failure to pay fines and how many of them have lost their jobs due to incarceration for failure to pay fines. I was also surprised to learn that people who are serving sentences for misdemeanor charges are required to pay to stay. Many of them are thousands of dollars in debt to the community when they are released.

Part of the thinking behind our local pay-to-stay program is that it will encourage people to stop committing crimes. I get that, and it may be true for some. But based on my experience, I suspect that it is a predominantly counterproductive idea.

Sure inmates are in a pickle because of their own choices. I do believe we all need to face the consequences of our choices. But most of them are already paying for their choices in a multitude of ways. And they will be paying for their choices long after they've served their sentences. If we want them to choose a legitimate path, it doesn't make sense to me to marginalize them even more by pushing them further into debt.

What does make sense--from both a public safety standpoint (politically feasible) and a humanitarian standpoint (which is apparently no longer as politically feasible because, you see, "we are a Christian nation" and so no one should be forced to be charitable through taxation)--is to do what we can to draw people in from the margins of society.

In Vain

Another photo that has been making the rounds on facebook that feels like a punch in the gut. Not in a "truth hurts" kind of way (which is what people who post it would argue), but in a battering-souls-in-the-name-of-God kind of way. If the loving God people claim exists, I'm quite certain this is not a message he'd embrace. In fact, I think this is exactly the kind of thing he meant when he asked us not to take his name in vain.

I have great respect for people who stand up for their beliefs, especially when it makes them vulnerable to derision and scorn. I think there's an important difference, though, between standing up for yourself (and your God) and wielding your faith like a weapon.

Pulse Uno de Inglés

This picture of John Wayne with the caption "Now just why in the hell do I have to press '1' for English?" has been making the rounds on facebook lately. Sigh.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a high school student a few years ago who was complaining that the instructions on a box of macaroni and cheese were in Spanish as well as English.

I asked him if he thought private companies, who are responding to the demands of a free market, should be restricted from or penalized for providing services in languages other than English. And who says their markets stop at our borders? "Oh," he said. "I hadn't thought about it that way."

The Beginning

Yes, I'm starting another blog. This one is going to be focused on ideas that I want to think through, sometimes in bits and pieces, sometimes in longer more cohesive posts.

I'm driven by two things. One is my frustration with binary thinking in our culture (nationally and locally). The other is my belief that pretty much anything can be a double-edged sword. Water is essential to life. But too much water can kill us.

Exploring complexity and finding balance. That's what I'm striving for.