No crisis left unexploited
This crisis is too good to leave unexploited, said Rahm Emmanuel. And Tom Friedman’s latest is in the same mode.See, says Friedman, it wasn’t corrupt bankers, overconfident Wall Street wizards, or oblivious politicians at all that is responsible for the crisis — it was Us! Middle-class Americans, with their consumerism and desire for prosperity. There’s some truth there, of course. Millions of Americans borrowed to buy houses they couldn’t afford and to buy things they didn’t need. It seems unlikley that we will return to our old level of consumer spending anytime soon.This would be progress. But read Friedman’s column carefully. This is a new version of the old leftist “We are all guilty,” argument, first trotted out in the Thirties by H.R. Laski in an attempt (unfortunately accepted by many at the time) to draw a moral equivalence between the Western democracies and Nazi Germany (in the interests of the Soviet Union).Now the moral equivalence is between irresponsible home-buyers and corrupt bankers on the one hand, and all the rest of us who weren’t irresponsible on the other. That distinction no longer matters to Friedman. Because, you see, it’s “our” lifestyles that are irresponsible. It doesn’t matter whether or not we lived within out means. It’s our civilization that isn’t living within its means!Thus the focus shifts from individual responsibility (Did I buy a house I couldn’t afford?) to collectivist solutions (i.e., cap-and-trade–already being abandoned by the Europeans–and other top-down climate control measures). I love this quote:“ ‘You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Rahm. ‘But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, “This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …” Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.’Get it? It’s our desire to eat cheesburgers, drive cars, live in McMansions and shop at Wal-Mart that is the “real” Ponzi scheme! Thus Freidman attempts to harness our understandable anxiety about the economy to his climate-change agenda. In fact, American fear is probably the single most exploited natural resource right now, as Obama and Nancy Pelosi try to harness it to power all kinds of agendas that have little or nothing to do with the immediate cause 0f the crisis–the toxic assets in the banks.