BENJAMIN BARBER: Well, it means a couple of things. And it is, by the way, a devastating economic fact. And here the economists will agree with me, a political scientist and a political theorist: it's no good for a country to do that. For a country that stops saving, becomes a debtor nation in every way. That's why we're in hock to China and the others who together own trillions of US dollars. That's why the dollar has collapsed abroad.
But it also means that we are no longer in a position to create the forms of industry, capitalism and social consciousness that come from saving. Saving is how we invest in the future. Saving means that we're putting money aside, deferring our own gratification, to create a future that our children can be part of. When we spend all of it on ourselves, and then, on top of that, even more than we have, we put ourselves, and, more importantly, we put the future itself in hock.
Meanwhile, economic entities in places like Dubai and China are buying the United States wholesale, using the hundreds of billions of dollars that we’ve spent on their goods. We are selling our sovereignty down the river by becoming a debtor nation -- a nation which, in effect, lives beyond its means, which has to borrow from abroad, has to sell its dollars cheap, abroad, in order to go on being a debtor nation, go on being a consumer nation.
The US is selling itself, and China is buying. China is buying into the global market. America is selling itself out in that global market. But the way we're doing it, selfishly, using only a consumer mentality, is to assure that America is ultimately going to be on the losing end.
BILL MOYERS: But money is washing through the world. Lots of big winners right now. Tell us more about who’s losing and who’s winning.
BENJAMIN BARBER: Well, not only are there billions, literally billions of people in the developing world -- in Africa, southern Asia, and Latin America -- who continue to be, not just losers, but losers bigger than before. The gap between rich and poor is growing, not declining. From World War II to the 70s, the gap got smaller. But starting in the 70s it leveled out. And after that it's been growing steadily. That's true of both north and south. It's true even within the United States.
The great majority of the world's people live in poverty. They have real needs and wants, but capitalism won't address them, because it doesn't figure it can make enough profit off addressing them. And so, instead, it addresses all these faux needs — and that imbalance, in what needs are addressed, is, of course, the deep driver behind global instability, global war, and even global terrorism. The weak state systems, the economic poverty that disables societies, combine together to create a climate within which terrorism and fundamentalism grow. So we are ignoring an inequality that is going to come back to haunt us.
BILL MOYERS: But don't leave us down in the dumps. How do we encourage capitalism to do what it does best, which is to meet real human needs?
BENJAMIN BARBER: I'll give you a couple of hopeful examples. There's a company in Denmark that's gotten very rich, very fast, making something called the Life Straw. It's a thing about two feet long. Inside it are about nine high-tech filters that filter out all the contaminants and germs that you find in third world cesspool water. If you buy one of these for a couple bucks, a woman in the third world and her family can drink through that straw, and it doesn't matter what water they have available. It cleanses that water. A little firm in Denmark that makes that life straw is making out like a bandit. But properly so. They're being amply rewarded for taking a risk.
Similarly, some folks working in alternative energy are going to make real money.
BILL MOYERS: Creative capitalism and tough consumers. Third?
BENJAMIN BARBER: Number three, we've got to retrieve our citizenship. We can't buy the line that government is our enemy and the market is our friend. We used to say government can do everything, the market can do nothing. That was a mistake. But now we seem to say that the market can do everything and government can do nothing. But government is us! Government is our institutions. Government is how we make social and public choices working together. We've got to retrieve our citizenship.
http://www.benjaminbarber.com/
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