CHAPTER 4
AN ECONOMICS OF LOVE: A NEW BOTTOM LINE
The Latin root of the word economy refers to the management of a household. There is no better example of right management of a household than the economy of nature. It is a perfect ecosystem in which nothing is wasted, every part of the whole has a perfect relationship to every other part, and all things inherently move in the direction of greater life.
The problem with modern economics is that it does not honor the economy of nature, but rather has set itself up in competition with nature. It is based on the organization of goods and services for the goal of profit, rather than for the goal of furthering life. As such is out of alignment with the enlightened thinking necessary to guide us to a sustainable future.
When viewed through the lens of modern economics, the primary driver of the economy is profit. When viewed through the lens of an enlightened economics for the twenty-first century, the primary mover of the economy is human creativity.
When financialization replaces production as the dominant way to make money—as has happened over the last four decades in America—the dignity and creativity of human beings is sacrificed. For example, when capitalists take over a profitable company that produces and sells goods, carve it into pieces, shut down operations, put people out of work, and bankrupt the company, but then they make millions of dollars doing it. That is the kind of scenario that has resulted from the separation of capitalism from ethics. It is unconscious capitalism and an amoral economics. Human beings are there simply to serve the economy, when in fact the economy should be there to serve human beings. Transaction replaces relationship as the main mode of human organization. And all hell breaks loose from there.
Enlightened economics is moral, in that it honors the needs of people and planet before the needs of the marketplace. Interestingly, Adam Smith, the primary analyst of modern capitalism, argued that the free market cannot exist outside an ethical context. Yet today it does, which means that it is not free. Since the 1980s, economic policy in the United States has been driven by a decidedly amoral perspective positing that the demands of the marketplace—unlimited by any ethical restraint—should be our financial bottom line.
A healthy, free economy is about more than numbers. It is about more than things. It is about more than goods. It is about us.
An unconscious capitalism—freed from government protection of workers and the environment through the removal of Glass-Steagall legislation, global trade deals that fail to protect the American worker, taxes favoring wealthy corporations, union busting, and more—has done incalculable harm to democracy, people, and planet. In the United States, it has destroyed our middle class and turned the majority of our citizens into little more than serfs to a system over which they feel they have no control. It has made the short-term profit maximization of multinational corporations our society’s bottom line, claiming this would lift all boats when in fact it has left millions without even a life vest. It has made people subservant to things, and loving human relationships secondary to money. It has replaced the tyranny of a king with the tyranny of an amoral economic system.
And it is time for this to change. The harm it is doing to our society is more than political or economic. It is a moral rot that leads to political corruption that leads to human devastation.
While it’s the task of economic policy to promote prosperity, more than money is needed to make life prosperous. True prosperity includes a sense of security and well-being that goes beyond finances. The ultimate prosperity is dwelling in the sense that all things are possible. And the ultimate American Dream is the establishment of a society in which, if anyone works hard enough, then they have a reason to feel that way.
Our economics should honor that dream, not function in a way that as often as not shatters it. To survive, people need our base-level physical needs met. But to thrive, people need more than that. We need meaning. We need spiritual sustenance. We need a sense that our lives matter.
Our economic system should serve, not stymie, a genuine prosperity. It should free, not limit, the ability of all citizens to harness their creativity in service of something larger than themselves. That lifts people to our higher place, out of which creativity and energy flow naturally.
That is why education, health, infrastructure, and culture should come first, for they are the most serious investments a society can make in the happiness and well-being of its people. Happy, secure people are much more likely to produce creativity and wealth than are those who are struggling just to survive.
We should not just ask if the economy is healthy; we should ask if we are healthy, in every way that the word has significance. When we are healthy, our economy is more likely to be as well.
Our political establishment posits the idea that a healthy economy guarantees a happy society. If that were true, given that we are the richest nation on earth, we should be the happiest. Yet clearly we are not. High rates of depression, suicide, economic anxiety, drug addiction, incarceration, and environmental toxicity are not the marks of happiness.
A healthy economy is currently defined as total output of gross domestic product (GDP). But GDP should not be seen as an accurate measure of our well-being, whether economically or in any other way. It overlooks the issues of working conditions, environmental well-being, and health and safety, among other things. It doesn’t take into account the chronic anxiety, opioid addiction, and emotional state of millions of Americans traumatized simply by living in their neighborhoods.
Our primary economic indicators measure products but don’t measure us. In that sense, our view of economics is unnatural; it is an idolatrous way of thinking that bows more to material values than to universal human values. When we turn our focus toward being a good society rather than a rich society, a lot more people will be richer in every way.
What is referred to as an economy that’s “doing well” is actually one in which, however low the official unemployment rate may be, 40 percent of all Americans struggle to make ends meet and have a hard time covering their food, shelter, transportation, and health care costs. Many of them are referred to as the “working poor.” Yes, they are working. But they are not doing well. Many official figures coming out of Washington do not reflect their difficulties so much as make a mockery of them. Our government’s attitude toward economic despair is often less about ameliorating it and more about announcing to the desperate that they’re not really desperate.
An economics of love makes people, not products, the focus of our investments. An economics of love does not take an unsophisticated view of finance, but in fact has a more sophisticated view of how money is created. Our greatest creative energy comes not from outside us but from inside us; therefore, anything that supports our internal growth supports our capacity to economically thrive. It’s long been recognized that ensuring that people feel respected for their contribution to a workplace and valued for who they are as people does more to increase their productivity than does money alone.
Money is created by creativity, not the other way around. The source of our creativity is within. It is part of who we are. The greatest proof of this is evident in any kindergarten anywhere in the world.
Consider, for instance, a Montessori classroom, where children are allowed to roam among play and work stations. Are they not industrious? Are they not creative? Are they not in their own way entrepreneurial? Most of our economic theories were invented by men who had not spent a particularly great amount of time around small children—not even their own. If they had, perhaps they would have realized that people are naturally creative and industrious, particularly in the first eight years of life.
An economics in sync with the more enlightened thinking of the twenty-first century is an economics based on two main factors: one, feed the creativity of the child in order to foster the productivity of the adult that child will become; and two, remove as much unnecessary anxiety as possible from people in order to unleash their creativity and productivity.
It is not as though children want to create, but then lose the desire as they grow older. Rather, creativity is too often beaten out of people. What happens in a society like ours is that so many people live with daily economic stress and anxiety that their creative juices are sapped. (What will happen if I lose my job and I don’t have benefits? What will happen if I get sick? What will happen if one of my kids gets sick? How will I pay for my kids to go to college? How will I pay off my college loans? Will I have enough money to retire without going broke?) Some argue that we “can’t afford” programs such as universal health care and the cancellation of college loan debt, yet the sleight of hand there is preposterous. Every dollar invested in education is an investment in tomorrow’s economy. Every dollar invested in people is an investment in their productivity, and thus a larger consumer base. Our current economic functioning has nothing to do with long-term economic planning, and everything to do with leeching from our system every possible short-term advantage for a minority of our citizens. Thus, we steal from our children, our planet, and our future. If we were really thinking about our long-term economic good, we would be massively realigning our investments not toward our economic overlords, but toward we the people of the United States.
Americans of every age are entrepreneurial by temperament, and when we’re supported in such endeavors and allowed to thrive, we are naturally productive. Each of us carries within us greater God-given potential than most of us will ever actualize. That is as true of a poor person as it is of a rich person. No socioeconomic group has a monopoly on the desire to create, to contribute, and to do so with dignity. Millions of Americans work hard and are deeply creative, yet can hardly make ends meet. That doesn’t mean they’re any more “lazy” than rich people. The often articulated correlation between wealth-creation and willingness to work—and the concomitant correlation between poverty and unwillingness to work—is false. In fact, millions of America’s most industrious citizens—people who get up before dawn each day, raise families, and work the hardest—struggle daily to make ends meet.
Such assumptions as those mentioned above are simply vicious stereotypes used to justify the leeching of resources from those who need it most. The majority of America’s poor are not looking for handouts but for a fair shot—which too often they are not receiving now. There is a difference between handouts and simple economic justice. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “When they give it to the rich, they call it a subsidy; when they give it to the poor, they call it a handout.” Governmental policy skewed in the direction of giving more to those who already have more, and less to those who already have less, is neither just nor democratic.
We defer to the needs of the market when instead we should be deferring to the needs of the people.
In the era of corporate conglomerates, employment has become nothing more than an amoral numbers game that is divorced from ethical considerations and turns the majority of people in the world into its servants. And too many people are left out of the game entirely, regardless of whether or not they have jobs. Financial figures are frequently used to obscure human realities that tell a different story than they do.
Traumatized, stressed-out, and unduly anxious people have a difficult time accessing their potential. Yes, some stress is healthy, but the economic stress of way too many Americans today is not that. Rather, these Americans endure the stress of having been cast out of nature’s economy. For while nature has a way of supporting the living creatures within it, an economic system untethered to an ethical center has a way of casting out anyone and anything that does not serve it.
People want to feel that their work in the world expresses their creativity and life force and produces more than money—that it also produces dignity, self-satisfaction, and a sense of meaning and purpose in the world. An economics that offers nothing more than “employment,” with little concern for what that employment offers above a baseline salary, is an economic model inadequate to the human demands of the twenty-first century—especially when that baseline salary is often not enough to enable hardworking people to support a family.
It is true—and to be respected—that successful businesses create jobs. But they are not the only engines of prosperity. And in truth, small businesses employ almost as many workers as big business does. It is only because big corporations have so much more money and influence over our government that they can skew economic policy in their favor. Making the profitability of large corporations the center of American economic policy has very little to do with actually serving the people, and everything to do with serving a donor class/economic ruling class that loves to present itself as America’s great economic benefactor.
Business is important, and successful businesses are essential to a healthy economy. But the business sector is no more important or more essential to our economic good than education, health care, or any other avenue by which people are aided in their ability to self-actualize. Education, not big business, is the biggest job-creating sector. The greatest job-creator in America is not the businessperson but the teacher—one who doesn’t simply give you a job, but prepares you for a career by providing you with the internal and external tools to create it. It is not just overseas outsourcing that has taken our jobs away; it is in equal measure our failure as a society to provide for the preparation of our citizens, from the earliest age, for the challenges of living in the twenty-first century.
Education, both intellectual and spiritual, is our largest engine of prosperity. Whole-person education prepares us to succeed. It gives us the training, hones the critical thought processes, and cultivates the attitudes that are essential to success. It gives people more than a path to a better job; it gives them a path to power. Perhaps that is what some American elites do not wish to see happen.
Health care is an engine of prosperity as well: first, because healthier people obviously have more energy; and second, because health insurance coverage takes away much of the economic anxiety that keeps people from soaring at full wingspan. Illness is one of the most common reasons people go bankrupt in this country: in the absence of health care coverage, illness robs us of both work and savings. It’s hard to imagine how much more money would be circulating through the American economy if so many Americans weren’t weighed down by illnesses—not only those they have but those they’re terrified of getting.
Art and culture are engines of prosperity because they expand who we are as people and broaden the scope of our creativity. They energize us and deepen our humanity. Numerous studies have established that participation in the arts increases cognitive skills, yet more and more American children lack exposure to them in any meaningful way. In the richest country in the world, we have seen arts curricula fading fast from many of our schools, leaving only a market-based entertainment industry to take up the slack. A lot of good comes out of Hollywood—in movies, TV series, and internet productions—but artistic tastes that require cultivation, such as classical art and music and theater, should be taught in our schools as a means of basic cultural literacy.
By not vigorously supporting the arts, not providing universal health care, and undereducating so many of our citizens, today’s economic system does more than keep money in the hands of a few—it keeps power in the hands of a few. It stymies genuine prosperity even while it claims to foster it.
None of us should accept the assumption that the business sector is the primary generator of prosperity. Such an assumption serves no one but the business sector, which then claims the right to undue economic advantages under the pretense that such advantages for the business sector foster a healthier economy.
Our esteemed economic councils shouldn’t have just financiers in business suits serving on them; they should include schoolteachers and child psychologists, experts in liberal arts and technical education, and those who know best how to nonpharmaceutically address the trauma of modern life. Help people soar and they’ll build their own economic prosperity, thank you. The paternalism of an economic system that first creates economic hardship for millions, then pretends to know how to assuage it, is delusional. Our current economic model is a holdover from an aristocratic perspective that views people as servants to a system; but our economy should be a system that is a servant to the people.
The theory of “trickle-down economics”—the idea that if we give enough of our tax dollars to the already highly paid business sector, then their economic prosperity will trickle down to everyone else—was cast like a modern spell over us during the final two decades of the twentieth century. Given current statistical evidence that most of our propensity for economic success is established in the first eight years of life, if we’re really going to subsidize those who “generate prosperity,” we should subsidize elementary school teachers!
Businesses that diminish the quality of life and well-being of our citizens do not make us more “prosperous.” Are fossil fuel companies and chemical companies engines of prosperity when the damage they cause to our environment increases illness and thus health care costs? Are big agricultural companies engines of prosperity when they wreck our rural economy? Are big pharmaceutical companies engines of prosperity when they knowingly hock unnecessary, addictive medicines for no other reason than to increase their bottom line? Are banks really engines of prosperity when they saddle college students with a lifelong burden of college loans?
All of those industries have the capacity to do good, and in many cases they do. But businesses should have the same ethical obligations to society as any other sector. The idea that a corporation should bear no responsibility to anything other than the financial bottom line of its stockholders destroys the social fabric of our society as well as the natural environment on which all business, and indeed all life, depends.
Those who decry the lack of conscience so rampant in corporate America today are not “antibusiness.” Quite the contrary. It is a grand American tradition to resist overreach by the capitalist system when it becomes unmoored from conscience. From the establishment of child labor laws to the rights of workers to unionize to regulations guaranteeing worker safety, corrective measures have been taken to stem capitalism’s excesses throughout our history. They are chapters in a grand American narrative. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed for New Deal policies that helped working people and restrained the worst impulses of capitalism, he argued that his policies would save capitalism, not destroy it. And he was right. The progressive economic conversation is not necessarily about repudiating capitalism, but simply holding it ethically accountable.
The tension between someone’s right to make money, on the one hand, and someone else’s right to clean air and water, safety, and economic justice, on the other, is built into any free market. What has changed over the last few years, however—primarily because of the undue influence of corporate money on our political system—is how often the government sides with corporate overreach rather than the American people! This change amounts not only to a different economic policy but to a radical realignment of the American government with the interests of its donors as opposed to the interests of its constituency.
In fact, business needs us as much as we need it. Business requires good schools for an educated workforce, just as democracy requires good schools for an educated citizenry. It also requires roads, bridges, and public transit to transport workers and goods. And business needs to have enough people who are doing well to buy its goods and services. Doing things that help people thrive shouldn’t be seen as an economic loss but as an economic gain.
We have acquiesced to an aristocratic economic system, lured into doing so not by the tyranny of kings but rather by political propaganda designed to convince the abused that the abuser is their friend. Tax revenue currently given to help the top .01 percent should be used to create the largest matrix of technical colleges and free institutions of higher learning in the world. The fact that our tax revenue is not used this way is a travesty of economic justice and a legacy of ancient serfdom.
The American people have been mentally trained to expect too little from our government. It should not be considered radical that, in the richest nation on earth, our government serves the health and well-being of its citizens before the health and well-being of multibillion-dollar corporations. We need to shift our thinking, and our organizing principles, from an economic to a humanitarian bottom line.
THE TRICKLE-DOWN ILLUSION
America has flourished most when corporations shared the fruits of increased productivity with workers and viewed their ethical obligation as extending beyond mere fiduciary responsibility to stockholders. Between World War II and 1980, we had a vibrant social contract whereby many corporations acted more responsibly toward workers, consumers, and communities. Unions were strong, and workers’ wages rose. People earned higher wages and could buy more products, enabling companies to thrive. Prosperity was more broadly shared. From the end of World War II until 1980, corporations in America were expected to consider more than just stockholders to be stakeholders in the company. Employees were considered stakeholders. The community was considered a stakeholder. The environment was considered a stakeholder. Why? Because all of us, not only those who were financially invested, were viewed as having a stake in what happened in corporate America.
After 1980, however, that social contract eroded. Companies shared fewer of the fruits of their labor with workers and pushed to crush unions. Governmentally, the entire decade of the 1980s was a full-scale legitimization of corporate greed. More of a company’s wealth went to CEOs and our top 1 percent, weakening our middle class.
The rugged narcissism of Ayn Rand married the greedy free-market-at-the-expense-of-everyone-and-everything-else of Milton Friedman and spawned the financial monster of trickle-down economics. The theory of giving all our money to those who already have enough of it in the hope that through job creation the money will trickle down to everyone else is demonstrably false. Yet that lie has been used in the United States for propaganda purposes for decades, despite all economic evidence to the contrary.
Tax breaks and other financial breaks that favor the wealthiest among us do not create greater prosperity for all; they simply siphon off more and more money to those who already have it and shift more and more money away from those who do not. They do not promote wealth-creation opportunities that benefit all; they simply redistribute wealth from those who do not have much to those who already do. The notion that a $2 trillion tax cut—with 83 cents of every dollar going to the wealthiest among us—is an economic windfall for the people of the United States is nothing short of a cruel hoax perpetrated upon the American people.
If we give a huge amount of money to the rich, we simply don’t have enough money left over to help those who are not. This tax bonanza for big business and the very rich drains the public treasury, intensifying pressure to cut vital programs like Social Security, Medicare, and many other social services. An economic model that steals from the American worker on the premise that, once having been stolen, the money will then be returned to them by the thieves who took it in the first place is patently absurd. And one more thing, lest we forget: the workers are supposed to be grateful.
This pattern amounts to more than financial theft; it is an assault on the foundations of our democracy. A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is meant to be just that.
A government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” has become a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.” Because huge corporate entities can supply campaign funds way beyond what can be supplied by individual citizens, such industries now exert an influence on government policy that is completely out of proportion to the social—and economic—good that they provide. In fact, the 2017 $2 trillion tax cut—which mostly benefited the very wealthy and the largest corporate entities—even removed the tax deduction for public school teachers who use their own money to buy school supplies for their classrooms because school budgets are inadequate!
Corporate interests dominate our politics so much at this point that our government, for all intents and purposes, is merely their handmaiden. Whatever Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. Corporatism is the new order of the day, and who suffers as a result? We the people.
Charles and David Koch, the owners of Koch Industries who pushed most vigorously for the 2017 tax cut, personally received a cut in taxes of $1 billion a year!
The Koch brothers pledged to spend $400 million in the 2018 election cycle supporting candidates who pushed for the tax bill and promised to continue to extend its economic influence.
In order to pass the bill, the same old trickle-down propaganda was trotted out and sold to ill-informed citizens on the basis that money spent on the tax bill—basically money stolen from the middle class and given to the wealthy—would “trickle down” to the rest of us through job creation, and so forth. But as usual, such propaganda is simply false. In fact, the vast majority of the tax cut money will not go to job creation and wage increases but to extra wealth for the already wealthy. This tax bill is not a reasonable piece of economic legislation; it is a raid on the US Treasury, a massive theft from the American middle and lower classes that will dramatically intensify already extreme income inequality.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1989 the average ratio of CEO to worker compensation was 59 to 1. By 2016, CEO compensation had skyrocketed while typical workers’ wages remained fairly stagnant, and the ratio had zoomed to 271 to 1. What this means, then, is that CEOs and stockholders were able to financially benefit from the growth of a company, but its employees could not.
Over the last forty years, CEO compensation has increased 1,070 percent, while the typical worker’s compensation has risen only 11 percent; the 2017 tax bill does nothing to assuage that. In fact, it will probably only exacerbate the disparity. Since the bill’s passage, big companies, instead of increasing workers’ wages have routinely used the tax cuts for stock buybacks, which simply directs more money to shareholders.
Before the 1980s, CEOs couldn’t be paid with stock options; a Reagan-era “reform” changed that, adding an inherent financial conflict to the role of CEO. The CEO of a corporation would thereafter have a financial incentive to increase stock value, often at the expense of larger stakeholder value and the long-term health of the company. Back when our government supported the values of democracy over an obsequious adherence to corporatist demands, corporations had more incentive to do the right thing.
Yet time and time again, Americans are asked to support measures that will aid corporate interests as opposed to their own, the very interests that crucify America’s economy and then present themselves as our economic saviors—a brilliant strategy and one that is working. But it will not work forever. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “You can fool all the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” We’re in the midst of a new American awakening, as more and more people realize that a company of thieves is a company of thieves, no matter how mild-mannered, educated, well-spoken, or generous to charity they might be. He who steals billions from the public but then throws a few million to charity is not someone deserving of thanks.
Private giving is important, but so is public fairness. Charity matters, but no amount of private charity can compensate for a basic lack of social justice. Beginning with the Occupy movement, Americans began to see the extraordinary economic disparity between the 1 percent and everyone else. Many now realize that our economy is rigged in favor not only of the 1 percent, but in favor of the 1 percent of the 1 percent. With more and more millennials paying the cost of a rigged system, and simultaneously more and more of them coming of an age to vote, American capitalism will self-correct or it will self-destruct. It is particularly unfair for people who will live the majority of their lives, or even all of their lives, in the twenty-first century to be burdened by the effects of bad economic theories that are outworn leftovers from the late twentieth.
If everyone in America is deemed to have been given by God “the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and if, as it says in our Declaration of Independence, “government is instituted among men to secure those rights,” then our government should be advocating for us, not for corporate conglomerates! It should not be whoring for systems that routinely endanger health, destroy our natural environment, and limit the capacity of those with fewer material resources to thrive.
And we the people have the right to say so.
HISTORY IS ON OUR SIDE
Our history is one in which overreach by moneyed forces, more often than not, has ultimately been met by righteous protest. Pushing back against what Thomas Jefferson called “the general tendency of the rich to prey upon the poor” is more in line with the “American way” than our current acquiescence to legalized economic tyranny. America has historically prided itself on expanding economic justice, not weakening it.
The narrative of our past is not one in which Americans consistently folded in the face of economic injustice; it is one in which, more typically, the American people railed against such injustice and ultimately prevailed.
The question of whether capitalism has a moral responsibility to people and the planet is not new. American brilliance applied to business has always been one of our greatest strengths, but we are also a people for whom ethics matters.
Our history has been marked by an ongoing struggle between the engines of economic prosperity, on the one hand, and the ethical considerations that make life meaningful and righteous, on the other. The sacrifice of our moral core to the false god of short-term economic gain is as morally dangerous for our society as it is for an individual. A morality that applies to everything except the things that affect real people’s daily lives is not morality at all. It is our moral responsibility to insist on just enough regulation of American business and to give enough pushback to an otherwise unfettered, amoral capitalism.
We should neither romanticize the history of capitalism nor fall prey to an intellectually lazy, knee-jerk condemnation of it. We should support it when it supports us and push back against its overreach when it becomes untethered from ethical considerations.
That is what Americans have done before, and that is what we should be doing now.
The industrial revolution of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought forth a burst of productivity never before seen, with the industrial prowess of railroads and factories putting America on the path to becoming a major world power. Yet that burst of industrial power induced a financial drunkenness in its main beneficiaries that eventually was met with appropriate, often heroic resistance on the part of both citizens and government. Yes, Henry Ford built the Model T, but he also used a private security force to shoot demonstrators at his factory. Yes, American manufacturing flourished, but it took the passage of child labor laws to make it illegal for six-year-olds to be put to work in factories. Yes, the “robber barons” built great cultural institutions, but they also amassed their enormous wealth by exploiting workers and the environment.
It took the advent of the labor movement, nonprofit organizations, and legislation such as the passage of antitrust legislation and union protections to guarantee a more just economy for all Americans. With the founding of this country, we had already repudiated an economic royalism; we did not, and do not, want to go back to it. Workers should receive fair compensation for the fruits of their labor, and our natural environment should not be desecrated in the name of economic progress. It is those convictions—not the allure of an aristocratic redux—that created the American middle class and made us the wealthiest nation in the world.
After World War II, the GI Bill created by Congress allowed millions of returning soldiers to attend college and enter the workforce at a higher level than they would have otherwise. A nation devastated by World War II then realized that our biggest opportunity for an economic re-greening lay in educating the American population and rebuilding our infrastructure. This civic wisdom led to an explosion of economic prosperity among us and the creation of America’s great middle class.
An extreme corporatist agenda—increasingly hostile to democracy itself—has worked hard over the last few years to interrupt that pattern and change America’s course. It has worked hard to diminish the power of unions, reduce the progressive nature of the tax system, undermine the effectiveness of regulatory agencies, and slash spending on programs like public housing and other aid to the poor. All of these actions have contributed mightily to increased wealth inequality and other economic and social injustices experienced by the working poor as well as those without work. Most recently, corporatist forces represented on the Supreme Court have even chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, diminishing the power of the people most affected by those injustices to fight back against them.
The new corporatist extremism has come at us with such shock and awe over the last few decades that our resistance to it has sometimes been fragmented and unfocused. Like a boxer hit right in the eyes, we’ve been knocked back so hard that, seeing stars, we’ve been unable at first to adequately respond. And at other times, after being hit again and again, we have simply grown too weak to hit back. But knowing our history can create the emotional support we need to get back into the game. It’s almost as though we can hear our ancestors exhorting us, “Get up! Don’t let this happen! Fix it!”
A fundamental shift in the functioning of our government—from primarily serving the financial interests of a small group of corporate entities to once again making the interests of the people of the United States its highest priority—is the course-correction now needed.
The average American isn’t asking for gifts from Santa Claus; he or she is asking for simple fairness and decency and respect. The values of brotherhood and justice that form the framework of any right relationship form the framework of a healthy society. And that applies to the economy too.
Millions in America today—hardworking people who should have every right to feel securely ensconced in the middle class—are only one unfortunate step away from the ranks of the poor. They know that a health crisis, a car accident, or a layoff could ruin them financially. Their anger and despair are valid.
An unfettered global capitalism, untethered to any ethical considerations beyond its fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, is both a political and spiritual abomination. Any system that lacks compassion, love, and conscience is out of alignment with the moral laws of the universe and in time will produce chaos.
It is spiritual voices that should decry such injustice—and often do. In his 2013 exhortation on global capitalism, Pope Francis said:
While the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so, too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. The imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. . . . A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. . . . The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.*
A new economic ethos, one aligned with a consciousness not only of prosperity but also of justice, not only of wealth-creation but also of deep democracy, is rising up among the people of the United States and the people of the world. This represents an unstoppable force that the American capitalist enterprise would do best to work with, and not against. Otherwise it will create its own repudiation. Someone once said that if we want things to stay the same, then some things are going to have to change.
MONEY IN SERVICE TO LOVE
And now for the good news!
Fortunately, many corporate leaders in America today are enlightened thinkers. Some are working daily to transform the capitalist ethos, putting it back on track with the angels of our better nature. In a 2018 interview with the New York Times, for instance, the fashion mogul Eileen Fisher said that she believed stock sharing with employees should be mandatory. “I think corporations should have to share a minimum 10 percent of their profits with the people working. It’s not socialism; it’s good for business.
Fisher is not alone among successful American business leaders who are turning the tide toward corporate responsibility. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has founded a movement called “conscious capitalism,” calling upon corporate leaders to reintroduce ethics and values into corporate governance. In the summer of 2018, the Danone Corporation, a multibillion-dollar global company that acquired American Whitewave Food, converted its entire corporate structure to a B-Corporation (or B-Corp.). A B-Corp. bases its success on social and environmental performance, going beyond profit maximization. It holds itself both publicly and privately accountable to a higher ethical standard. Danone is joining a group of conscious capitalist firms that have outperformed their public counterparts by a factor of ten to one as measured by stock valuation.
An argument for a loving economy isn’t an argument against the free market; if anything, it’s an argument for letting more people into its ranks. This argument recognizes that what is free to many of us is not free at all to millions of people who are locked out of the “free market” entirely.
How many young Americans whose lives are stymied by the burden of thousands of dollars in college loans would love nothing more than to have the cash on hand to start their own small businesses? How many hardworking Americans, trapped in one or even more low-paying jobs, have the talent and ability, as well as the desire, to be creating, producing, and contributing to America’s consumer base—if only they had a chance?
All of us know, deep in our hearts, that a good life for everyone is a better life for everyone. Not every rich person is greedy any more than every poor person is noble and pure. A politics of love in America doesn’t speak to the part of us that is rich or poor, but to the part of us that is American.
We don’t just need small, random acts of love today. We need huge, strategized acts of doing the right thing. I don’t believe that God simply wants us to be good people; I believe God wants us to be a good nation. Not just personally but also politically, we should care. And I believe that deep in our hearts, most of us do.
In truth, a moral argument is not incompatible with an economic argument, because aligning with a higher natural order is never to humanity’s detriment. The universe of love is a universe of plenty. After World War II, millions of veterans were able to go to college because of the GI Bill, which also made low-interest mortgages available to expand homeownership, and President Eisenhower’s administration built the interstate highway system. These government actions, by making deep investments in the bottom line of bettering the lives of human beings, helped create the healthiest economy America has ever had.
LOVE AND WEALTH INEQUALITY
There is no real mystery as to what created the wealth inequality that’s now higher in this country than at any time since 1929. The systematic removal of American wealth from the middle and lower classes to the very richest among us has been happening for decades.
At this point, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth. The three richest people in the United States have as much money as the bottom half of all Americans.
The problem, of course, is not that some people are rich. As Americans, we celebrate the opportunity for wealth-creation among hardworking people. The problem is not with individuals, but with an unfair system. The problem is that our laws are skewed in such a way as to make it easier for the rich to stay rich and get richer, and harder for those who are not rich to rise above their circumstances. The system now makes it unnecessarily harder for average Americans to break the material chains that bind them.
Currently, the driving impulse behind policies emanating from three political power centers—the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court—is to favor the financial viability of large corporations at the expense of their workers. The current argument over net neutrality is just such an issue, with our newest Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, having argued that net neutrality laws—which ensure that everyone has the same access to the internet—would be a violation of corporations’ First Amendment rights!
That’s the face of a government that puts corporations before people. The elite use government statistics to brag about how many jobs they’ve created, but more and more of those jobs are low-paying rather than middle-class jobs. And the low-paying job sector in America does not routinely pave the way for growth opportunity, but rather is increasingly an economic trap in which millions of people are forced to rely on public assistance while their corporate overlords earn obscene amounts of wealth.
More than 50 percent of employees in the fast-food industry rely on some kind of public assistance. The co-owner of Burger King has a net worth of $25 billion, while his workers receive an estimated $356 million in public subsidies every year. And once again, those subsidies are paid for by you and me. McDonald’s, with a net worth of more than $104 billion, actually encourages its workers to sign up for public assistance. It’s our money that pays for food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing, so that some McDonald’s workers can put food on their tables.
According to one report, in 2014, Walmart employees received billions in public aid. How does that jibe with the fact that the Walton family, which owns Walmart, is the wealthiest family in the country, with an estimated net worth reported at somewhere around $130 billion?
Jeff Bezos, worth an estimated $158 billion, bowed to public pressure and increased the wages of all US workers at Amazon to $15 an hour after Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would have taxed Amazon for the amount that we, the US taxpayers, were billed in public assistance to his underpaid workers. Bezos’s move is not without controversy, however, since some Amazon workers will lose benefits, including stock options.
Ideally, when it comes to increasing the minimum wage, more corporations will follow suit and raise wages as Bezos did. Until then, the rest of us will continue to foot the bill for the failure of some billionaires to pay their workers fair wages. The cost to taxpayers of increased public assistance to these workers is so high, in fact, that the very purveyors of the unjust system are champing at the bit to start cutting the government entitlement programs that make it possible for many people to simply live.
There are a few American politicians struggling to right the ship of American capitalism by using the powers of government to advocate for the right of every American to simple economic justice. In addition to a bill sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders to charge huge corporations the amount of money we’re having to pay in federal assistance to the employees they routinely underpay, Senator Elizabeth Warren has also introduced legislation to encourage greater corporate responsibility. Called the Accountable Capitalism Act, this bill aims to restore some of the social responsibility “that many companies showed for several decades following World War II.
The idea that the role of our government is to advocate for the economic aristocrat rather than the right of the average American to pursue his or her happiness is contrary to everything this country is supposed to stand for. It is bad economics, and it is bad for democracy. The God-given unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” should include economic fairness.
There are good politicians who see what has happened and are trying to change it. There are good corporate leaders who see what has happened and are trying to change it. There are good social and political activists who see what has happened and are trying to change it.
It’s time for the rest of us to weigh in.
Chapter 5 will be emailed tomorrow!
Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love
Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot