JUST KEEP HOPING FOR REAL CHANGE

Maybe I have come to the time of my life when I want to re-affirm everything I believe in: social justice, free exchange of ideas, the need to be informed, and government with a conscience. Maybe at the heart of my visit to Paris is to see how the French really feel about living in a country which may be flawed but with the best health care system in the world and where higher education is a right. Maybe I am wanting to repeat the scene from “Sicko” where Michael Moore sat in a bistro in Paris chatting with Americans living there.

Maybe I read too much and like an impressionable kid I am most moved by the last significant thing I read. Maybe I have lost all my critical ability and look only to reinforce my own beliefs (prejudices?.) I want to believe my own axioms like: government is the employer of last resort. Or – a country is judged by how we treat the least of our people. How about the rusty old: “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” Is this simply worn-out liberal dogma, or as I believe, truths that ought to be revisited?

I watch, not without sympathy the writhing of the American government trying to bring some kind of justice to a struggling society while at the same time continuing to manifest their absolute belief in “market forces” and in the inevitability of certain truths like continuously preaching about the “engines of progress,” – sometimes the "engine"is big business and industrial production, sometimes it is small business, sometimes it is a revived service industry, sometimes it is consumer spending. No matter how they “writhe” they seem only to want to pursue policies that fit an immutable ideology. Any other choice seems to lead to the birth of stuff like the Tea Party Movement, and a concerted effort to elect political dinosaurs who have some mystic belief in less government.

Maybe in France, if I can make my French language skills equal to the task, I can talk to real Frenchmen about the fulfillments they expect.

I don’t want to visit there as some wild-eyed pinko looking for every reason I can find to discredit capitalism and exalt government. Maybe I have read too much of “When China Rules the World,” the latest book about the decline of American hegemony. That would be far too doctrinaire and wasn't I the one-time political candidate who was tired of the ideological straight-jacket holding many devotees of The Left?

Now as I rant, I wonder. Perhaps what I would really like to see it less devotion to ideology and more downright pragmatism. I am heartened, believe it or not, by the fact that the Bush government was the one which spent hundreds of billions to prop up a collapsing banking system. Even they understood how government must intervene on behalf of its people.

So I am just a little incredulous when I keep hearing about how part of the road out of the unemployment crisis is to encourage companies to start hiring by giving them tax breaks. Or to get things moving by giving tax credits to ordinary people. The fatal flaw in both choices is that industry hires people when the market says it will buy more of the stuff they (the industry) make, and that tax credits to people who need them most are to people who pay so little tax in the first place that a “credit” means nothing.

It is all because the idea of direct intervention is so contrary to the utter belief that free market solves all problems. The paradox is obvious: the marketplace failed – not only in America, but England which is now described as the sick man of Europe and in debt-plagued Greece and in Spain where unemployment is at a raging twenty percent, or in Ireland where the Celtic Tiger has turned into a whining alley cat.

Roosevelt may be the last person who got it right. And that was nearly 80 years ago!

Maybe I’ll find a few other ideas in France. Stay tuned.

(By the way, if this blog reaches you let me know. If you do not want to receive it – let me know and I’ll drop you from the list.)