At the conclusion of a traditional, and for the most part reasonable, discussion of the limits of government in determining economic movement, David Brooks manages this:
Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins.
Has Brooks ever actually spoken to anyone who’s falling further behind? As poverty rates reach one in six, does the columnist sincerely believe systemic sin is responsible? With unemployment over 9%, is Brooks convinced that all the jobless deserved to be forced from their jobs?
He goes on to quote Matt Yglesias about bus drivers suddenly laid off in Clark County, Nevada.
Are those soon-to-be-unemployed bus drivers really suffering for their sins? Is it really true that a federal government currently able to borrow money at a negative real interest rate can’t do anything to protect them? The amazing thing about this crisis is the extent to which suffering and responsibility are completely out of proportion with one another. If you think about the people who are really suffering in the developed world today, none of them were executives at major banks, none of them were politicians involved in the construction of the euro, none of them were senior financial policymakers in any government, etc.
So Brooks achieves the scorn of others. And he has it coming. And yet.
It seems to me that a careful reading of the Brooks analysis does not reveal a rejection of the bus drivers leading a blameless professional life. He does not condemn those who are hurting through no fault of their own. He simply does not consider them. This is not heartlessness. Or at least it may not be.
David Brooks joins a fraternity of limited vision established before antiquity. Most of us belong. We form judgments based the clarity of personal observation. And we fail to think beyond that except in the occasional statistical analysis that breaks through. We react less to numbers than to real people. And people are real if we know them.
Washington pundits declared for over a year that the issue real America was concerned about was lower taxes and eliminating the deficit. Kitchen table discussions they were familiar with were not really about who had lost a job, but rather about investment portfolios. And so that is what was real for them. The rest existed, but mostly as numbers.
When Rick Santelli of CNBC launched his famous rant against economic losers, he stood in the middle of a cheering group of stock traders, employed by the financial houses that had brought ruin to the nation. That so many had been saved by taxpayer money was a part of normal business. Gesturing expansively toward his audience of money managers he yelled as they roared their approval. “This is America. President Obama, are you listening?”
While Santelli was angry about the injustice of rescuing the homes of “economic losers,” it may be that he was not thinking about teachers, workers, police officers, and bus drivers. His personal experience had been with the economically exclusive. In fact, his outrage was more specific than generally recognized. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.”
It could well be that the some in the cheering crowd had themselves made the agonizing choice of postponing expansions of the McMansions they owned. Perhaps a few even knew about others who were in trouble as a result of adding more rooms to their estates. Bus drivers? Who said anything about bus drivers?
A Missouri Republican state representative recently suggested that cuts in breakfast programs for kids could be easily made up if families would eat out one or two fewer times each month.
Sure there are hardships. But they don’t affect everyday people. People I know.