Cranberries and Government: the Way Our Free-Enterprise System Really Works

Grants to Promote the Cranberry Business

An article that illuminates the relationship between government and business in our society appeared in the Post-Crescent on October 28, 2013. The article is entitled ”Feds to Back Cranberries in Wisconsin”, and it says,

As part of $52 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture grants to support specialty crop producers, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection will partner with the University of Wisconsin researchers to help cranberry growers reduce pesticide use and environmental threats as well as expand the international market by determining the overwintering patterns of the cranberry flea beetle, testing soil-drench efficiency and sharing the information with local producers, according to a USDA news release.

“These investments will strengthen rural American communities by supporting local and regional markets and improving access to fresh, high-quality fruits and vegetables for millions of Americans,” USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a news release. “These grants also help growers make food safety enhancements, solve research needs and make better informed decisions to increase profitability and sustainability.”

Government/Business Partnership Contradicts the Radical Rightist View

Here we see a fine example of the partnership between public and private investment that has always supported the growth of our economy and the well-being of our people.  Radical rightists like to say that government is always the problem, never the solution, and they believe that the size of government should be minimized in order to reduce the drag on the economy that is produced by taxation. The taxes that we pay are seen a nothing more than money that is drained from the private economy and that is used unproductively.

This “cranberry grant” shows how limited and distorted the radical rightist view is. In fact, government expenditures have always been important to the growth of the American economy. American agriculture is one of our most successful and profitable industries, and it is an area that has developed with government support for more than 100 years.  President Abraham Lincoln signed the law that created the land-grant university system. The University of Wisconsin is a part of that system, and researchers there have for generations carried on research that has promoted the development of Wisconsin’s agriculture.  The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established the partnership between the land-grant universities and the US Department of Agriculture to support agricultural extension work, which brought the results of research to farmers in all parts of the country. Thus, American agriculture has developed as a partnership among the federal government, the state governments, the farmers and the businesses that support farming, and the “cranberry grant” is only the latest fruit of this century-long partnership.

Many Industries Depend on Public Investment

Agriculture is not alone in its dependence on public investment.  The automobile business – that icon of 20^th century American industry – has always depended on public investment in roads and highways.  Without the hundreds billions of dollars of public money spent on roads and highways by state and local governments as well as the federal government, the automobile business could not have developed as it has. The oil business has also benefited from the growth of the automobile business that has been fostered by public investment in roads.  In Wisconsin, the tourist business that supports much of the northern part of our state could not exist without the roads. How many Chicagoans would go to Door County for the weekend if they had to take an overnight boat from Chicago to get there?

There are plenty of other examples. The aircraft business, another very successful American business, has been helped for decades by the procurement activities of the United States Air Force and by the efforts of our State Department to promote sales of American military equipment to other countries.  The internet was created with the support of the Defense Department, and without that public investment, none of the businesses that have grown up around the internet would exist at all.

The Role of Government in Banking

Our economy has also benefited from the government’s banking policies. When our country was founded, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the new federal government assume the debts contracted by the states during the Revolutionary War, and since that time, the full faith and credit of our government has stood behind the its debts and through them it has stood behind the value of the US dollar. Our businesses are able to borrow at reasonable rates all over the world because no one doubts the stability of the dollar.  The Glass-Steagall Act and other regulations introduced during the nineteen-thirties protected us from banking panics for more than sixty years, and we all know what happened when those regulations were eliminated.

We Should Not Kill the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs

I could go on, but the point is clear. The American economy and through it the American people have benefited greatly from the partnership between public and private investment that is the most outstanding characteristic of the American free-enterprise system. Minimizing the size of government would impoverish all of us by cutting off the funds that have supported research, built our infrastructure and promoted our products around the world. Such a policy would also expose us to banking panics and the economic insecurity that they bring.  As we work to solve our government’s current fiscal problems and reduce its debt, we should remember these things. If we do so, we will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The Meaning of the Confederate Flag

The Origin of the Flag as a Symbol

Tea Party demonstrators in Washington are waving the confederate flag in front of the White House. Why are they doing it, and what are they trying to say?  Why do people continue to find it a moving symbol 150 years after the end of the Confederacy?  The flag was as we all know, the confederate battle flag.  So, at the beginning, it symbolized the southerners’ fight against what they perceived as an unjust invasion by the United States into southern territory. The South claimed the right to secede from the Union, and the federal government said, “No.” In this context, the confederate flag fit well into the long, American political tradition of opposition to a strong, federal government, and hundreds of thousands of southerners rallied to the flag in the name of state patriotism.  A man like Robert E. Lee, supported the secession in part because of his devotion to his native state of Virginia.

From the beginning, however, the meaning of the flag was ambiguous because the secession was not disinterested. The people of the South did not choose to secede from the Union because of a disinterested devotion to the principle of states’ rights.  They seceded in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and the secession was led by the class of large slaveholders. However, most of those who fought in the confederate army were not slave holders. They had no need to secede, but they were persuaded that it was their duty to fight.  Thus, they fought and died in defense of interests that were not theirs.  

The Flag in the South after the Civil War

After the Civil War and the Reconstruction, the confederate flag was used again by the southern ruling classes to regain and then to maintain the control that they had lost in the war.  They wrapped themselves in the confederate flag as they justified the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, but the real purpose of that system was to use the power of local governments to keep a cheap labor force on the land. People were terrorized to keep them docile. Voting restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests were devised.  This system resulted in the oppression and poverty not only of African Americans but also of hundreds of thousands of poor white people who labored as sharecroppers on southern plantations. Their interests were actually the same as those of their black neighbors, but the ruling class whipped up racist feelings, waved the confederate flag, and enlisted the poor whites in the defense of the system that oppressed them.

The Flag Today

Now, again, we see the confederate flag being used to get ordinary people to act against their own interests. A person who waves the confederate flag in front of the White House is expressing his anger at what he sees as an overbearing federal government that is trying to take away his rights and his freedom, but again, he is being manipulated. 

Some very wealthy people want to keep their taxes as low as possible. They want to be able to pollute the environment in order to make money. They want to keep wages low.  They have supported a huge propaganda campaign to portray the EPA and OSHA as unwarranted interference into the rights of businesses and as killers of jobs. They oppose the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because it is an expansion of the role of government, and they know that down the road, it will prevent their taxes from being lowered.  So, they have poured money into persuading people whose lives may be saved by the EPA or by OSHA to campaign for their elimination. They have poured money into persuading people who have no health insurance that the ACA will be an infringement on their liberties and a killer of jobs. Thus, the confederate flag is today what it always has been. It is a symbol of citizens’ resistance to federal power that is used by elites to manipulate people into opposing policies that would benefit them.  Those who wave the confederate flag see themselves as Davids facing a government Goliath, and they do not understand that this is not their fight. In the name of freedom, they wave the flag of slavery and fight to strengthen the chains that hold them down.

Why Are Political Opinions Impervious to Facts?

Political Opinions Are Not Opinions About Facts

Why are political opinions impervious to facts? We have all noticed that people almost never change their political opinions as a result of exposure to facts, and we have all wondered why this is so. It bothers us that people can be so “unreasonable.”  The people we disagree with us always seem especially stubborn in their opinions. How, we ask ourselves, can those people be so blind? How can they persist in opinions that are clearly contradicted by the facts?

We never say that about the people we agree with.  We never accuse them of holding opinions that are contrary to the facts.  This bias in favor of people we agree with is independent of our opinions. Liberals think that conservatives are impervious to facts, and conservatives feel the same way about liberals.  What is going on here?

In order to answer that question, we have to begin by recognizing that political opinions are not opinions about facts. They are opinions about policy. They are opinions about what we as a society ought to do, or about what the government ought to do or about what politicians ought to do.  Consider Obamacare. The difference between liberals and conservatives with regard to Obamacare is in their answer to questions like these:

·         Ought the federal government to regulate the market for health insurance, or is it better to allow the free market to regulate it?

·         Ought the government to require individuals to buy health insurance, or is it better for each individual to decide this question for him or herself?

Political opinions are generally answers to questions like these. They are statements with “oughts” in them.

Statements With “Oughts” Cannot Be Deduced From Premises Without “Oughts”

Questions like the two listed above cannot be answered by an appeal to facts, and the reason why facts cannot answer these questions lies in a basic truth about logic: we can never deduce a statement with an  “ought” in it from premises that that do not contain an “ought”. 

For example, suppose I say that in our community, many people are starving. Does that imply that we ought to set up a food bank to provide food for them?  No, it does not.  Perhaps, each person is responsible for providing for his own needs, and if someone is unable to do so, that is too bad for him, but it is not my problem.  In order to deduce the conclusion that we should provide food for the starving people, we have to introduce a premise with an “ought,” or – to put it differently – a moral principle.   We have to say something like “We are our brothers’ keepers,” or “Reaching out our hands to help our neighbors is the right thing to do,” or even “A rich community like ours ought not to allow its members to starve.”  Armed with such a premise, we will be able to deduce the need to set up a food bank. Thus, we would say (1) a rich community like ours ought not to allow its members to starve, (2) members of our rich community are starving.  Therefore, we should set up a food bank to feed the hungry people.

Political opinions are almost all answers to questions like, “Should we set up a food bank to feed the starving people?” and that means that they can never be deduced from facts alone. We can arrive at them only if we first introduce moral principles as a premises.  Unfortunately, we in America today are uncomfortable with moral principles, and we are especially uncomfortable with moral disputes. We prefer to think that morality is a matter for each individual to decide for him or herself.  So, in our political debates, we appeal to “the facts” in our effort to persuade, but “the facts” never persuade because underlying the debate is a difference of opinion over basic, moral principles, and that difference is concealed because we don’t like to argue over moral principles.

For example, underlying the debate over Obamacare is a basic moral question.  Is it a responsibility of the community to make sure that everyone has access to health care regardless of his or her ability to pay even if the community has to require everyone to be insured, or is that requirement so egregious an infringement on individual liberty that it ought not to be allowed? Those who support Obamacare say that the infringement on individual liberty is an entirely reasonable price to pay because it is a responsibility of the community to make sure that everyone has access to health care. Opponents of Obamacare find that the infringement on individual liberty is too high a price to pay because, ultimately, everyone must take responsibility for providing his or her own health care.

This disagreement extends to opinions over the current government shutdown.  Those who believe in the community’s responsibility to provide health care for its members see the president as a hero who has removed from the United States the stain of being the only modern nation that does not provide all its members  with  health care.  Such people naturally see the Republicans in the House of Representatives as blackmailers who would use the budgetary impasse as a lever to  move the country backward.  Those who believe that the infringement on individual liberty is intolerable see the president as the villain and the House Republicans as heroes.  No appeal to facts can possibly change these views.

Facts Can Make Us Uncomfortable

We do not like to debate moral principles, but we still have them, and since we do not like to debate them, we often do not think about them systematically.  Consequently, we are able to hold moral principles that are contradictory.  At some level, we may believe, for example, that each individual is responsible for his or her own welfare and at the same time believe that the community should help those who are unfortunate.  Such a person may – to use our earlier example – oppose the establishment of a food bank and yet be uncomfortable when he or she hears that many people are starving.  In this situation, it is easy for him or her to ignore the information or to impugn its source, to say, “That is an example of the liberal bias of the media,” or “That is an example of the conservative bias of Fox News."  We all do this. We ignore uncomfortable facts, or at least we give them less weight than comfortable ones, and so, even when we might be influenced by facts, we are not. In this situation, our preference for not examining our moral principles makes it hard for us to see their effects on our choice of facts to see.

Facts Can Rally the Troops or Help to Make a Case

Facts can be used to rally the troops. Facts that are consistent with our moral stances can be used by leaders to rally us behind their standard.  Thus, liberals are thrilled by the large number of people who tried to enroll in Obamacare last week, while conservatives are equally thrilled by predictions that Obamacare will ruin the economy. Facts can also be used to make a case. If we already know what we want, we can marshal facts in support of our view.  They help us to feel that we are right.

Thus, in a political debate, we see both sides marshaling facts, but neither side is really talking to the other side. Instead, each side is rallying its troops and strengthening its case in its own eyes. Facts are armor that helps to defend us against the enemy. They are not weapons to persuade him. As a result, we get parallel monologues rather than real dialogues. We will not be able to have real, political dialogues until we recognize that political discussions are not about facts. They are about moral principles.

Throw The Bums Out!

Now, we know where everyone stands, and now, we know what we have to do next year.  We have to vote Representatives Ribble and Petri out of office.  They have shown that they are part of the problem and can never be part of a solution. Last night, both of them voted with the radical rightist crazies in the house to hold the government hostage to their extremist views on The Affordable Care Act. 

The latest insanity passed by the House of Representatives promoted a year-long delay in the implementation of the central parts of the act and tried to repeal one of the means of paying for it: the tax on medical devices.  Ribble and Petri cast their votes in favor of this nuttiness in spite of knowing that the bill they supported stood no change of being passed in the Senate.  Their vote was a clear vote for shutting down the government.  They will of course say that if the president and the Democrats in the Senate weren’t so stubborn, the government wouldn’t have to shut down, but that is disingenuous: they knew what they were doing.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. It has problems that will need to be fixed, but it is one of the best things that have been done in Washington for many years. It will provide a way for millions of  people to have health insurance, and in the long run, it will help  to bring down the cost of health care in the United States.  That is why the radical rightists in Washington are so afraid of it. They're afraid it will work, and they're willing to shut down the government rather than allow that to happen.

If we want to have a rational government instead of a government that is held hostage by radical rightest ideologues, we have to vote Ribble and Petri out of office in 2014. 

If we want to have a government that is   responsive to the people and works to solve the real problems of our time, we have to vote Ribble and Petri out of office in 2014.

During the next 12 months, we have to devote ourselves to the cause of getting rid of Ribble and  Petri.  Of course, merely getting rid of two congressmen won’t solve the problem People all over the country must work with us: Republican legislators who voted with the radical rightist crazies must be thrown out of office.

The campaign starts today. Let’s get busy!

 

Dialogs In Place of Competing Monologs

Yesterday, on Facebook, I responded to an article that had been posted there, and I want to expand here on what I said on Facebook and explain why I think the issue is important. The article to which I responded was entitled “Misinformed USA: Why average Americans vote for Republicans,” and it had originally appeared on the web at http://www.examiner.com/article/misinformed-usa-why-average-americans-vote-for-republicans

My response said,

I really hate this kind of thing. This article is patronizing and demeaning to millions of people, and statements of this kind offend them and turn them away from progressive political action. People know when they are being looked down on, and it makes them angry. It does not persuade them to adopt the views of those who look down on them. Moreover, while it is true that right wing media distort the news, it does not follow that people on the right are stupid or uninformed. Issues like abortion or gun control revolve around genuine moral and political dilemmas, and the Republicans have exploited those dilemmas very intelligently. We progressives have not been nearly as clever in our approach to these issues, and the recognition of our clumsiness should make us feel a little humble. We need to learn that we can support progressive political positions without denigrating those who oppose us.

We have to stop talking about our political opponents as if they were stupid and engage their concerns directly if we are to succeed in engaging them in dialog or in persuading some of them to change their minds. For example, we have no dialog with our opponents over the issue of abortion. Instead, we have competing monologs. We on our side frame the issue in terms of “a woman’s right to choose,” while our opponents frame it in terms of “a child’s right to life.” There can be no easy compromise between these two views.

If we are to make progress, we must find a way to do an end run around the confrontation. One way to do that might be to refocus the discussion on birth control. Those who oppose both abortion and birth control are vulnerable to the accusation that they increase the likelihood of women being injured or killed by illegal abortions. If one is “pro-life,” one must be concerned about the life of the mother as well as that of the child. If we can engage people in this kind of a discussion, we may have a chance of changing some people’s minds, and along the way, we may reduce the need for abortions, too.

The issue of gun control is another one where we have competing monologs instead of dialogs. Those who favor gun control cite the horrendous damage that is done by people with guns every day in this country. Those opposed to gun control root themselves in the established, American tradition of the use of guns by citizens to defend their rights and their safety. This tradition is deeply rooted in American culture. It is a part of the mythology of the Old West, and hundreds of films and novels tell stories about law-abiding citizens who had no choice but to use their guns to defend themselves from evil-doers. In addition, the use of guns by citizens to defend themselves against an oppressive government occupies a respectable place in our culture that goes back to the “embattled farmers” of Lexington and Concord.

If we are to make progress toward better control of guns in our society, we must find a story that resonates in our culture in the way that the stories of the Battle of Lexington and the mythology of the Old West do. One such story might cite the struggles of farmers and ranchers in the Old West too free themselves from the dominance of hired gunmen. For example, the story of the Battle at the OK Corral may be seen as a story of legitimate law-enforcement ridding a community of private gunslingers. Today, people in the West do not need to carry guns because our western towns and states have effective law-enforcement.

These are a couple of examples of the kinds of things that we could do if we took seriously the views of our opponents and tried to find ways to engage them in dialog on our terms. I don't know whether they do what I hope they will do, but I am sure that if we were to put our heads together, we would be able to find more ways to turn the  current pointless, competing monologs into useful dialogs.

Why We Should Not Attack Syria

A Limited Set of Strikes?

President Obama has asked Congress to approve a limited set of strikes in Syria. The strikes, he says, are intended to punish the Syrian government for gassing its own people but not to affect the outcome of the Syrian civil war.  We should do this, he says, because we must send a message to the world that the use of poison gas is unacceptable to us and that we will attack anyone who uses it.  If we allow the Syrian government to get away with using poison gas, we will embolden others who might want to use it and thus make the world into a more dangerous place than it already is. In other words, this will be a purely humanitarian series of bombing raids or missile attacks.

When we put it bluntly that way, we can see immediately how absurd it is. First of all, there is every chance that our bombing raids will kill lots of people (collateral damage) even if our targeting is excellent, and we know that our targeting, while it may be good, will not be excellent. Mistakes will be made. Intelligence will be faulty, as it always is. So, we will probably end up killing nearly as many people as Assad’s gas attacks did.
Second, the idea that we will make a single series of strikes and then walk away is not believable. We have been through this before. After the strikes, we will discover that Assad continues to be a bad guy who does bad things to his people, and as the civil war grinds on, the people will continue to suffer. How, we will ask ourselves, can we allow that, and how can we allow the effort of the first strikes to be wasted?  With just a little more effort, we will tell ourselves, we will be able to attain our goal, whatever it is.

So, we will conduct more raids, or we will put in teams of Delta Forces or Navy Seals to “advise” whichever groups of insurgents we decide to support. Those teams will be insufficient for us to attain any worthwhile goal, but along the way, some Americans will be killed. So, we will expand our effort because, after all, we have to support our troops in the field.  Then, more Americans will be killed, and we will increase our effort again. And so it will go. You know I’m right. You’ve seen this movie before.

What is Our Goal?

Then, there is the question of what our goal is. The idea that we only want to act as a referee to insure that the Syrian civil war is fought according to the Marquis of Queensberry rules is nonsense. We have interests in the Middle East. We care about the oil, and we care about the shipping lanes that run through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. We have allies in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Israel, and we have enemies there like Iran. So, it is disingenuous for us to act as if we only wanted to be an honest referee. We do care how the civil war ends.

Unfortunately, we have no idea how to advance our interests in Syria.  We cannot stomach Bashar Assad, but his opponents in this war include radical Islamist groups, and replacing Assad with a radical Islamist government would not help us much. Moreover, such a government would be opposed by Israel, by Saudi Arabia and by Egypt. (Remember? The Egyptian army has just deposed an Islamist government, and we have tacitly supported the army’s action by refusing to label it as a “coup.”)  If we were living in 1918, we could just walk in and take over Syria. It would become a “protectorate.”  But we live in 2013, and that is not an option.

So, we don’t know what our goal is in Syria, and committing military force in the absence of a clearly defined goal is stupid and criminal.  The first requirement for a successful military campaign is that it must have a clearly defined objective than can be attained by military action. If you haven’t defined what “winning” means, or if you have defined an unattainable objective, you can never win. You can only inflict damage on your enemy.  That was the core problem in Vietnam. We never defined a goal there that was attainable. Our military forces in Vietnam performed splendidly, and our troops made enormous sacrifices, but in the end they were all for nothing. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died in the war, and when we left Vietnam in 1975, we got the same deal that we could have obtained for free in 1945, in 1954 or in 1965.

We would like to say that our goal in Syria is to establish a peace-loving, democratically-elected government that is friendly to us, but such a goal is not attainable by military means. We tried it in Iraq, and what is the outcome? Today, Iraq has a Shiite government that is friendly to Iran and that supports Bashar Assad.  Today, people in Iraq are being killed every day by Sunni insurgents. 

We have been fighting in Afghanistan for more than a decade, and what is the outcome?  The Afghan government is famously corrupt, and the Taliban continues to be important in the Afghan countryside. Maybe, the Taliban will be defeated, but that will not make the government honest or democratic.

Stay Out of Syria

So, we should stay out of Syria because we don’t know what we could do there to advance our interests. That is hard to accept, but it is true. If we attack Syria, we will be drawn into a war that will cost many American lives and far more Syrian lives, and we should not do that without an objective that we really believe we can attain.

Personal Troubles and Public Issues

What is a Public Issue?  

On Facebook recently, I have had occasion to criticize the radical rightist point of view by saying that it ignored social structural and institutional realities. Here, I would like to explain what I mean by that. In his book, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills wrote about the relationship between personal troubles and public issues. He said,

In these terms, consider unemployment. When in a city of 100,000 only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills and his immediate opportunities.  But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual.  The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.[1]

                Mills’ point is that each of us lives in a particular time and place and that in that time and place, we are affected by large, structural and cultural forces over which we as individuals have no control.

Contemporary Public Issues: The Internationalization of Business

            The internationalization of business is a good contemporary example.  We live in a time when large businesses are not bound to particular places. They can locate their operations anywhere in the world, and when a hundred workers in Appleton, Wisconsin are laid off because the factory where they work is closed and its operations moved to Georgia, to Mexico or to China, the causes of their troubles must be found in the changing character of the world’s economy. The workers are not unemployed because they are lazy or because they lack skills. They are unemployed because the economy of the world has changed under them and rendered their skills obsolete in the place where they live.

                If that were all, we could still advise them to go to Fox Valley Technical College to learn new skills and consider the problem solved, but that is not all.  Their new poverty will reverberate through our community.  They will no longer spend as much on food, clothing or entertainment as they did when they had jobs. So, the profits of local merchants will decline.  They may no longer be able to pay their mortgages, and their houses will be repossessed, which will cause a decline in the values of all of our houses.  The decline retail sales and the decline in real estate values will cause a decline in local tax revenue, which will put a strain on all of our local services like schools, fire departments and sanitation departments.  The unemployed workers will no longer have health insurance, and when they need care, they will go to emergency rooms. Emergency room care is very expensive, and they will have no money to pay for it. So, the cost will be passed to the hospitals and ultimately to the rest of us in the form of higher health insurance premiums.  In short these workers and all of us are caught up in the changes brought about by the internationalization of the world’s economy, and we cannot deal effectively with this change by thinking only of what each individual can do to survive. We have to think about our common, structural situation.  We have to see the problem as a public issue and not just a scatter of personal troubles.

Contemporary Public Issues: the Crash of 2008

The financial collapse of 2008 provides another example. Before the collapse, millions of people were caught up in frenzy in which banks extended credit far beyond what the debtors could reasonably be expected to repay.  When the credit bubble collapsed, millions of people, including many who had not taken out loans during the frenzy, were affected. They lost their jobs. With their jobs, they lost their health insurance. Some also lost their homes. The entire economy was in danger of collapsing.  That it didn’t collapse is due to the fact that our government recognized the structural nature of the problem. It was not just whole lot of personal troubles. It was a public issue.  The government did not waste time worrying about the stupidity or selfishness of the people who had brought on the crisis. Instead, it moved to prop up the banks. It took over the automobile companies and restored them to health.  It provided extended unemployment relief to unemployed workers.  All of these measures bought time in which individuals were able to find solutions to their individual troubles.

The distinction between personal troubles and public issues is important because a personal trouble can be overcome by individual action, but a public issue cannot.  A public issue can be resolved only through collective action.  For example, no individual could have done anything about the financial collapse of 2008 (or about the bubble that preceded it).  An individual could in some cases limit his or her personal loss by selling stocks and holding cash, but that option was available only to relatively few people and in any case did nothing to resolve the main issue.  People who lost their jobs or their homes could not do much about it. On the other hand, we were able as a society to limit the scope of the damage through collective action in the form of the TARP program and other programs. 

Public Issues and the Radical Right

We Americans are often unprepared to recognize public issues and to distinguish them from personal troubles.  Our individualist culture encourages us to think of situations in terms of individual persons and events. Our news media reinforce this cultural bias in our perspective because they are focused on each day’s news rather than on the forces that underlie the news. The media tell us of exciting events, of heroes and of villains, but they do not tell us much about structural forces because they operate over long periods that are difficult to report on.

The radical right in the United States turns this American cultural bias into a political principle.  It rests on a denial of the existence of structural forces or public issues. In the radical rightist view, only personal troubles exist, and if a person has troubles, he or she is responsible for dealing with them. The best thing that the rest of us can do for such a person is to get out of his or her way. Offering things like extended unemployment benefits does no good and in fact is harmful because it allows an  individual to put off finding a solution to his or her personal troubles.

In the radical rightist view, the free market works perfectly and guarantees benign results. If, as happened in the crash of 2008, the results are not benign, that must be because of misguided and harmful government intervention in the free market.  Thus, for example, the radical rightists insist that the crash was caused entirely by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through their insistence on promoting home ownership by people who could not afford to own homes. The “creative” used of variable rate mortgages, interest-only mortgages and mortgage backed securities with fraudulently high ratings would never have existed if the Fannie and Freddie had not pressured the banks to make loans to people who could not afford them, and without that pressure, there would have been no crash.  No matter that such crashes have been a regular, periodic feature of our economy at least since the Panic of 1837, and no matter that the 2008 crash occurred in places like Spain and Ireland where Fannie and Freddie were not involved.

The radical rightists’ insistence that only personal troubles exist would be only a curiosity if it were not used cynically by some very wealthy people whose goal is to reduce the taxes they have to pay.  They spend huge amounts of money on propaganda in support of the radical rightist doctrine and in support of political candidates who advocate it. The argument is simple: if there are only personal troubles, there is little that government needs to do, and if there is little for government to do, there is no reason for it to collect so much money in taxes.

The radical rightist denial of the existence of public issues is wrong.  Forces like the internationalization of business or the crash of 2008 are real, and they cause troubles for people.  But those troubles are not merely personal troubles. They are public issues, and only collective action can solve the problems that they create.

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[1] Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, New York, 1967, p. 9.