Today is the royal wedding day. The whole week I`ve been watching the preparations to the ceremony and learned a lot about British royal family. The topic that competed with fairytale wedding was Donald Trump`s bold and straight-out battle for birth certificate. What is the difference between British royal family and Donald Trump? Unfortunately, American royalty is the latter – Mr.Trump, the real-estate tycoon, billionaire, the man who calls the building in honor of himself. These days I try to understand the fascination around royalty, and deep respect and admiration of British to the Queen and her family. British talk a lot about sense of duty and responsibility inherent in their monarchy. If something is going wrong in the country, a monarch can`t resign or being fired. In case of failure the whole mess will be put on the shoulders of the children. Unlike the “children” the Tea Party uses in the slogans (that implies “next generations”), the monarch leaves the country literarily to its own child. It seems the countries are affected by their royalties. The opposite can be also true, but the celebrities of any kind represent some important society values anyway. Duty and restraint as a role model in one country stands versus narcissism, permissiveness and cynicism in the other. Is it surprising that during the economic crisis British Prime-Minister talked a lot about social responsibility the banks and businesses should have? Do not these statements often considered to be socialist in the U.S.? Is it fortuitousness that British banks as well as German banks were not deeply involved in subprime mortgages games and suffered much less from economic meltdown than the United States? The economic crisis that happened recently reflects the crisis of the society values and we would not be out of this gap unless we reconsider what is the most important in human`s life.
If you check the list of Nobel Laureates in economics you will see that overwhelming majority of them are Americans. It is not that there are not enough knowledge and professionals in the country, it is lack of common values and political will (that is the consequence of common ground absence). For example, there is nothing in common in Steve Forbes` and Ralph Gomory approach to the economic crisis. In “How Capitalism Will Save Us” Forbes states, “Despite the crisis, the global economy still retains enormous strengths. Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never before so many people advanced so far economically…” (164). Forbes does not elaborate on how far and how many people exactly advanced, because it is not the issue he cares about. Princeton University professor Ralpf Gomory paid attention to the difference between GDP and uneven distribution. In the Testimony Before the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Gomory states that from 1973 “if the gains in productivity had been reflected evenly in incomes, a typical worker would get 35% more today than in 1973… Median household income grew about 16 percent since 1973, much of that gain being due to the fact that many households became two-earner households” (183).While Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz in the article “Markets Can`t Rule Themselves” calls for more regulation, transparency and restriction “the scope for conflict of interests” (157), Steve Forbes calls not to blame the victim (169). Did you guess who is the victim and who is to blame? You are right! They are banks and regulation respectively. It seems plausible that banks do not like the regulations. We can even use the phrase “suffer from regulation”. But why should we care about the banks that keep raising credit card rates and earn billions on it (on us)? Probably, some people care because the banks stand for the icons of free market and capitalism in our belief system.
We call politicians for responsibility sometimes, but we religiously believe in the power of market. We came to the situation where “the market” actually is embodied in several personalities whom we trust (with our money and well-being) and admire as our royalty because they managed to get rich and not because they are responsible. For the British Queen all the citizens are her nationals. For the CEO who represent “the free market” the subjects are only share-holders. The system when CEO is rewarded annually or quarterly for the profits the company shows makes executives pursuit short-term goals and think less about the long-term consequences. Joseph Stiglitz suggests, “Compensation should be based on returns not from a single year but over a longer time period…” (157). Executives get hundreds of millions of dollars annually and nobody will ever take it back. The American society was not even able to prevent them from getting the bonuses in the midst of economic crisis. Why do we allow executives to receive bonuses for the failed job?
The only way I can explain why we worship rich people and don`t keep them accountable is Protestant version of Christianity. I think it is the consequence of Protestantism that made America (that means, Protestantism did a really great thing, no irony). The idea that if you are doing well and work hard you will be blessed in your real life, turned now into the conception that the amount of money is the exact measure of God`s blessings and thus, the measure of how good the person is. The only reason Donald Trump gets respect, attention, the right to say, “I`ve done a great service to the American people”, and not being mocked after it, is his money. If anybody can come up with any other virtue he has like intelligence, decency, friendliness, humor, generosity or whatever, I`ll appreciate it. So, unless we consider Trump as a winner and let him call anyone the looser (I believe he said it not just about Rose O`Donnell), we would not have the power to stand for the interests of average Americans. It is because all the talks about health care, education, jobs imply to some extent that it is the need to help loosers who just failed to become rich enough in the country of opportunities where the banks, corporations, doctors, lawyers, insurance companies, politicians care about us and try their best to help us become the winners.
The way out of the economic recession lies not on the road of discussions about free market. Even preschoolers have the rules when play games, so do all the people and all the games we play. The main question is whether we consider rich people and being smarter, better and special or we consider all the people as equally smart, good and special. And if so, should we be concerned about the well-being of all people in the country. Matt Damon mentioned recently his conversation with Republican strategist about health care where the strategist said, “You see it as a right and I see it as a privilege.” Unless we worship rich and powerful people because they are rich and powerful, we encourage them to be more arrogant, unfeeling and narcissistic. We can`t expect they will deign to concede our requests, because we praise them exactly for not sharing money with others and being tough and heartless.
Nice!!
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