Technology creates value and productivity.
It does this at an extraordinary, even accelerating rate.
The problem is neither economics nor our politics is equipped to handle abundance.
When the basics are easily afforded, most of us go on to luxuries. This should be true for societies as well as individuals. But it’s not.
The problem is that the business models for societal luxuries can’t be created without government. Government is the only force that represents shared endeavor. And ideology has declared government involvement in the economy anathema.
This has not always been true. It’s why Alexander Hamilton matters. It’s what we’ve always done. We have used government power to get things we wanted that no one company or person could buy. Public enterprise does what private enterprise can’t, and in a variety of ways.
The Erie Canal was built with government-backed bonds, through a state commission. The western railroads were built by government providing an incentive, in the form of free land. Same with our biggest universities. Our utility infrastructure, the sinews of all our cities and our lives, was built through cooperation with government. The Interstate Highway System was a government project. The Internet was subsidized by the government.
Today there are many goods and services We, The People want and need, but for which there is no business model that works only through private actors. The Amazon-Tesla space race would not be happening but for 60 years of government investment. Nothing in our world would have been possible without the mass, government-funded education of the last century, investment that is being wound down so that, what, a few billionaires get a few more millions? What are they going to do with that money?
This is the problem with the abundance technology has brought us. All that abundance is in private hands, building and buying private goods, when what’s needed are public goods, both to create employment and solve problems we all share.
Most of the new goods society needs are environmental. We need to clean out the Pacific gyre. We need to recycle things that we throw away. We start by picking it up. We need to bring balance back to nature, allowing other, more efficient predators a shot at over-abundant game animals. We need to save our environmental diversity, which protects our ecosystem from disaster.
Most important, we need to slow, to mitigate, and eventually to reverse the global warming that is a byproduct of what the private sector has given us.
Doing this will take the hard work of millions of people.
But there is no private business model for any of this, no incentive for businesses to mitigate the impact of waste or repair what is broken. Such business models must be created, out of whole cloth, and the money funding these business models must be public, in whole or in part. That’s because the benefits are public, not private.
This is stunningly obvious, to anyone with half a brain. We also need publicly-funded business models to cover healthcare, because it’s unaffordable otherwise. We need publicly-funded business models to recycle people, to train them in ways that are valuable to themselves and to others.
These new business models, taken together, can soak up all the excess labor being laid off by clouds, devices, and even self-driving cars. Anything else society needs, we can create business models for that, too. We don’t need excuses, like fear or wars, to do these things. We need business models and the commitment of resources behind them.
The trouble is that we are currently slaves to an ideology that denies this obvious reality. It’s an ideology as rigid as that of Marx or Hitler, which denies that societal goods are even meaningful. It’s an ideology which denies that government can be involved, as a matter of “principle,” despite hundreds of years of evidence to the contrary.
The ideology gets away with this, as the ideologies of the past got away with their crimes, by denying democracy. The Republican Party rules us with impunity, ignoring the popular will. It’s why today’s Republican Party needs to be destroyed, as utterly as the Confederacy or the Nazis or the Communists were destroyed. This is non-negotiable. Our stupid ideologies are as dangerous as any that have ever come from abroad, and deserve the same fate.
We need to get democracy back in order, everyone eligible to vote again, everyone given the option to vote again, so that demands for public action in the name of public goods will be heard, and heeded, by government.
Instead, the resistance to Trump chases every petty issue he throws our way. I don’t care who talked to Jeff Sessions about what. What I care about is whether Russia hacked our electoral systems, whether that can be prevented, and how that can be reversed.
This crisis asks the question, as all our past crises have asked, whether our democracy will survive. The criminals are now inside the house, tearing up the furniture, and pretending to be the householders when we challenge them on it. Instead of arguing with them about the sofa, we need to get the keys back.
But, then, we need to get to the business of creating new business models, before private excess destroys our shared planet.
