Author: Chris Satullo
Publication: Philly.com
Date: March 14, 2004
URL: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/8179381.htm
Here's my problem with America's
now-raging debate on the economy:
Not enough Hinduism.
I'm a churchgoer myself. But I have
to concede this: Christianity, in its simplistic (i.e., political)
form, is prone to binary thinking:
good/evil, white hat/black hat.
Applied to the economy, this habit
leads many folks to cling to specious couplets: corporations bad/unions
good; tax cuts good/social spending bad.
Think, by contrast, of Hindu philosophy.
One of the chief Hindu gods is a fellow named Shiva. The Destroyer - that's
the moniker he mostly goes by. But another of his epithets is The Creator.
Destroyer and Creator? What are those Hindus smoking? How can that be?
Well, Shiva embodies a central paradox
of life. To create the new, you must destroy the old. To create fire, you
must destroy wood. To make oil, animals must die. For the automobile to
prevail, blacksmiths must suffer. For Bill Gates to rise, the typewriter
repairman must fall.
Shiva destroys; Shiva creates.
But it's not just a zero-sum game.
Look back over America's long love affair with free-market capitalism.
The net result clearly has been more wealth and more health for more people.
This is so, even though the ledger includes much suffering, injustice,
inequality, and corruption, much strain on families and on nature.
The point is: Free-market capitalism
is Shiva. It is neither all good nor all bad; it is what it is, at once
creative and destructive.
The point is: The job of government
is not to "run" the economy. Shiva does not submit to a harness. Much waste
and mischief occur under that delusion.
Yet neither is it government's role
just to worship free-market capitalism, to hand over the keys. Capitalism
can do too much damage to public goods. In a democratic republic, those
goods should be valued more than mere wealth. They include little things
such as, oh, justice, equal opportunity, stable communities, education,
health care, parks, clean air.
Government's job is to defend and
expand those public goods. Free markets make that job harder, because their
mania for efficiency and innovation creates victims and inequalities. Yet
free markets also make that job possible, by generating wealth and innovation
which government can tap to heal victims and foster public goods.
Any leader worthy of the name must
master this dualism. A good leader needs some Hindu in him.
Which brings us to the current campaign.
Of President Bush, little need be
said. His rigid mind thinks in black and white. He worships capitalism,
no, make that the corporate perverters of it who fund his ambitions. He
has one answer to every economic situation: tax cuts. A good answer sometimes,
but not to the current muddle, which he has profoundly misunderstood as
a problem of low investment and capacity; it is a hangover from a binge
in productivity. He lifts barely a finger to bind market victims' wounds.
Not only isn't he much of a Hindu; he needs work on the Christian thing,
too.
On the other side, though, I could
barely wait for the Democratic contest to end - and not just because I
couldn't bear another minute of Dennis Kucinich's goofy mug. John Edwards'
late, populist push drove the party and its presumptive nominee, John Kerry,
back toward old, bad habits: protectionism, mindless business-bashing that
ignores the value of entrepreneurship, the use of public dollars to make
bad bets on losing industries.
Faced with a president doing epic
damage, can't these clowns do any better? God, I miss Bill Clinton, even
more than I want to slap him. He was the Democrat who got it, who mastered
the Hindu dualism. He knew that, in the long run, you hurt working people
by attacking free trade and innovation. But he also saw that it is an unpardonable
breach of faith to ignore the harm those forces do to some workers in the
short run.
Even Clinton wasn't smart enough
to predict today's dilemma. Part of what has tied the Democrats in knots
is that his formula - "Yes, your factory job is gone forever, but we'll
train you and your kids for the better knowledge jobs of the future" -
didn't anticipate off-shoring, didn't see that Bangalore might soon start
eating San Jose's lunch.
Maybe off-shoring is just a ripplet
that hysteria has hyped into a tsunami. That is a Democratic habit, after
all. I'm not smart enough to know. What worries me is none of the guys
running for president seems to be, either.
I'm looking for a sign, for someone
who knows how to dance with Shiva.
Chris Satullo is editorial page
editor. To comment, call 215-854-4243 or e-mail csatullo@phillynews.com.
