Let's see now, we solved job creation and taxes. That leaves us with the recent rash of institutional thievery masquerading as free-market capitalism.
3) Fixing Wall Street and Banking
Look, let's stop beating around the bush here. Wherever you look in the world of banking and Wall Street you find men and women lining their pockets any way they can. Long ago banks and brokerage houses decided that the sedate, green-eyeshade business models they had going for them, while profitable most of the time, were not profitable enough. They wanted more, a lot more. So they created gimmicks. When real things failed to produce large enough real profits, they created unreal things that created unreal profits. (Well, very real for them, but unreal in every other way.)
But when riding in hot air balloon, when you run out of fuel, the hot air cools to normal (actual) temperatures and down you go. All of which would be just dandy with me if those in the basket at that moment were the same conniving little pricks who created the hot air to begin with. But that's not the way it works right now, and that's why we keep getting what we've been getting rampant thievery with virtually no accountability. Heads they win. Tails we loose.
Which is precisely why the securities and banking industries fight any new, tougher laws regulating such behavior. Hell, if I were on the receiving end of so much easy money I'd want it to continue as well. But I'm not, and 99.9% of most Americans are not, and never will be. Instead we are the ones left in the basket screaming all the way to the ground when all that hot air disappears.
Again, the solution ridiculously simple. Let me explain.
One day a few years back, I was on a panel on a TV talk show with lobbyists from the accounting industry. We were discussing what went wrong in the savings and loan crisis. I said that one of the problems was that the thrift and banking industry had themselves been corrupted by crooked bankers and paid to cook their books. When asked my solution to that I replied, "jail."
One of the accounting industry lobbyists literally came of of his chair, stating loudly, "NO!"
That was all the evidence I needed. The lobbyist went on to explain that "we have to be very careful not to criminalize business behavior." To which I replied, "Well yeah, unless it IS criminal behavior, and it was."
Clearly men and women in expensive suits have a natural abhorrence of the very thought of going to jail. And, if more of them were sent to jail, more often, fewer and fewer would be willing to take the risks involved. Right now they have about as much risk of facing jail time as they do of getting hit by falling space debris. That must change before any of that kind of behavior changes.
Now, don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that lawful actions by shrewd entrepreneurs should become illegal. I am simply saying that most well adjusted adults know the difference business behavior that passes the smell-test and behavior that stinks to high heaven. And right now way too much of what goes on in the world of high finance stinks to high heaven.
"To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society." (The Rise and Decline of Nations, Yale University Press, 1982)
So there you are - solutions to the three most vexing problems facing us right now. Oh wait, there is one more, and it's the biggest and baddest of the lot: a shocking paucity of elected officials with even passing familiarity with the concepts of character, courage and sacrifice for the public good.
That's the one that may get us in the end.
"Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to all;
Step by step we rouse to greatness, -
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