Big banks failed, and the government bailed them out. Three big automakers are on a slippery slope, and it looks like the government is on the verge of bailing them out too.
In response to these events, everybody has been looking for someone to blame. During the campaign, both presidential candidates took pot shots at Wall Street CEOs, and at CEOs in general, for their purported greed. In recent weeks, everybody has been blaming the top executives of the car companies that are looking for a loan from the Feds.
"Look at those fat cats arriving in Washington in private planes," so many people have said. "Look at how out of touch they are with the people on Main Street USA."
Yet are they really out of touch? In the larger scheme of things, why play the blame game? Of course, any narrative goes better when there is a villain. But in this case, I think that I have met the enemy. And the enemy is us - the way we live, the way our businesses conduct themselves, our very economic system.
As I look back over the last 40 years, it becomes pretty clear to me that a lot of American business has been built on fluff. More specifically, American businesses have tried to invent products and to market them, even when there has been no demonstrated need for them.
I have been part of the problem, in the publishing world. I have sat in meetings where new publications were invented, and plans to market them put into place, even when there was no real need for those publications to exist in the first place. It's been the old, "Let's just see if anybody buys this turkey" kind of game.
That kind of activity is pretty benign in publishing. If a new publication fails, it doesn't do much harm to anybody. But it is a far different story in, say, the investment world. When a bank or investment company decides to test a new kind of product to see if it "flies," it is often the customers who incur the damage when the product fails - be it a new jumbo mortgage or a mutual fund that is run up a flagpole just to see if someone will buy it, just to see if it flaps. And when that product doesn't flap - well, by then the executives who dreamed it up have already moved on to new jobs, because nobody sticks around anywhere for long these days.
When I was a kid growing up, my parents had their money in a savings account, where it earned steady, predictable interest. Over the next four decades, marketers introduced all kinds of new products that were supposed to be better than a simple savings account. And because of those "better" products, people have lost their homes, savings and retirement accounts.
So I offer up the Emersonian perspective, that we are all ultimately responsible for the things that we decide, and for the things that result from those decisions. I have met the villain and it is me - guilty as can be, because of my greed, desire to make money without really working hard for it, and lots of other undesirable truths. And today might be a good day to pick up and read my copy of Walden. I have a notion that old Henry David has something to say that will shed a lot of light on this very question.
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