WHAT IF
For some years now I’ve thought of myself as living in an era in which a bumbling, incompetent administration was creating a mess that would take generations to undo. It was only a few days ago that a thought struck me. What if they’re smarter than I’m giving them credit for? What if it’s intentional? I’ve been worrying that idea, as a dog worries a bone, ever since. There’s a reasonable case to be made for the apparently random results of a number of inexplicable decisions actually being part of a larger, long term, plan.
“Third World” is a pejorative term that we apply to nations with certain characteristics. They lack a middle class. The poor are very poor. The rich are very rich. No matter what their theoretical form of government, and despite the laws on their books, the poor have no truly guaranteed rights. The rich have rights which extend well beyond what we would consider reasonable and often well beyond those which the local law allows.
Being rich in the United States is nice. Being rich in a third world nation is heavenly. I’ve been told of a family of five living with three maids, a cook, a butler and a chauffeur on $20,000 per year. The client who talked about this also mentioned how grateful the household employees were to have such wonderful employment. A friend, an Ecuadorian developer, told me that he had the legal right to have his employees whipped if they disobeyed an order. A Brazilian friend spoke of his ranch and gave me its size in hectares. It wasn’t until I returned home and looked up the size of a hectare that I realized that it was larger than the State of Rhode Island. Being really rich is only possible in the third world.
The members of the second Bush administration are all rich; well sort of rich. They’re not as rich as their Saudi friends even if they have the same amount of accumulated wealth. They are not as rich as their Latin American counterparts. It’s not that they wouldn’t like to be. It’s that the laws of the United States, at the time that George W. Bush was elected for the first time, got in the way. If we view the actions of this government as being the work of a group of greedy men trying to turn the United States into a third world nation for the benefit of themselves and their children, all of the blunders, all of the missteps, cease to be anything of the sort. They become part of a whole. They represent a group of rational steps leading to a goal. Once I reached that conclusion, I decided to enumerate the more egregious of them to see if my theory made sense.
I decided, as I always do, to look first at taxation. The graduated income tax has always been one of the impediments to accumulating wealth. The estate tax was the means of protecting society from the danger of creating a hereditary autocracy. I found that there was nothing to really think about. The income tax is much less graduated than it was at the beginning of the Bush administration. The difference between the tax rate on dividends and that on earned income is clearly an effort to disadvantage the working individual and to benefit the more sophisticated and wealthier investor. The estate tax has rapidly been reduced in scope. It is scheduled to end in 2010. It will theoretically resume in 2011 but one of the president’s stated goals is to make its demise permanent.
I next turned to the economy. Ronald Reagan cut taxes with the stated goal of starving programs that he considered to be improper as functions of government. At no time did he suggest that the government should print money or borrow it so that the programs could continue despite the lower taxes. Congress accepted only half of the program but Reagan’s intention was clear. He was a true fiscal conservative. This administration is committed to lowering taxes while continuing or expanding expensive programs. Since the people in the administration are intelligent and conservative I concluded they have not entered this course by accident. I began casting about for a rational reason for taking a government with a fiscal surplus and turning it into one with a huge deficit. The end result of such an action has to be hyper-inflation. That’s where I found my answer. One of the characteristics of third world nations is the absence of a middle class. Argentina provided the perfect model of the way to destroy your middle class. Just create a hyper-inflation and your middle class is gone. The poor live from hand to mouth. Hyper-inflation to them is just the nuisance of having a few more zeros added to the end of their paychecks and then rushing out to spend the money before another zero appears. The rich have land and factories and commodities and items that do not lose their intrinsic value. The middle class has savings that must be spent quickly before their value disappears and securities that must be sold in an effort to maintain their way of living. When those are gone, they have joined the ranks of the poor.
I next turned to international relations; specifically to the export of jobs and the importing of “guest” workers who are happy to work for substandard wages. If you hope to live with the joys of being rich in a third world nation then the poor have to be truly poor. Think of the joys of running a household with six servants, all of whom are grateful for the job, on $20,000 per year. There’s only one way to achieve that; render the American worker redundant. How do you do it? Ship his or her job overseas and then bring in impoverished foreigners to take the jobs that are left. There is no such thing as a job that Americans don’t want to do. There are lots of jobs that Americans don’t want to do at the price that employers are willing to pay. If you look at the administration’s policies in the aggressive search for NAFTA type agreements and in the creation and encouragement of guest worker programs you realize that they are aimed at the destruction of the blue collar middle class. These are the people who have turned the United States into a First World leader. Their absence will cause our decline into mediocrity and then poverty.
Eventually I was forced to confront the Iraq war. Why would anyone want to start a war on false pretences when the results were so easily foreseen? My earliest thought was that George W. was getting even for Saddam’s effort to have his father killed. I have now concluded that I was being simplistic. I now see two reasons for the war. The first comes from a Bush quote. “I am a wartime president.” If you seriously want to be above the law, the trick is to be a wartime president. No one really knows what limits exist for a president in such a position. Get caught releasing classified information to promote a policy. “So what? I secretly declassified it.” Try doing that when you’re not a wartime president. Go on a fishing expedition in violation of Americans’ Constitutional rights? “It’s OK. They were bad guys and I’m a wartime president.”
The second reason that I could find for an otherwise incomprehensible war goes back to the economic question. If you really want to create an insurmountable deficit you need a war. There’s no other way to spend so much money so fast and without too much Congressional surveillance.
We keep hearing about passing our excesses on to our grandchildren. That’s what we are doing, but not in the form of a national debt. We are destroying our nation by exporting our factories, by leaving our national financial future in the hands of those foreign nations that own our debt and by allowing a few greedy men to turn us from a healthy democracy to a hereditary autocracy.
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