The Last Shame in America
(Page 2 of 4)
July / August 2003
By Perry Glasser, North American Review
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Meanwhile, inflated job titles and flatulent job descriptions keep us comfortable in our isolation by co-opting our identities. No one works for anyone anymore, but a lot of us have joined organizations to engage in a collaborative, mutually beneficial effort, as if we were all partners in the making. While secretaries might be prone to exchange frank mutually beneficial information about their jobs, administrative assistants would never be so indiscreet. No business in America any longer employs a clerk, though quite a few retailers pay thousands of sales associates clerklike salaries to walk a sales floor. If you try to find a foreman at a work site, don’t trip over the shift managers.
It’s all so flattering—America is a classless nation of leaders. No wonder those levelers of the workplace, labor unions, have faded in popularity. A secretary might consider union membership, but no ambitious administrative assistant wants to be out of the air-conditioning with armpits gamy as Norma Rae’s—that’s for workers or laborers.
Rhetoric that leaves us unable to distinguish ourselves from our employers helps provide corporations with a self-policing, pliable workforce. Ignorance and shame about money also create the tsunami of revenues that washes through the financial service industry. Money in motion generates fees; managed money generates more fees; advice on how to manage or move money generates yet more fees.
Underpinning the financial services industry is the dubious claim that finance is a complicated and ever-changing realm no layperson can hope to understand. In partnership with government, the financial services industry generates a never-ending parade of bewildering financial vehicles, each a new and improved version of the last wave of bewildering vehicles. IRAs—Roth, regular, and SEP—529 plans, UTMA accounts, 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans, whole life, wrap accounts, universal life, decreasing term life—the jargon proliferates like detergent boxes at the supermarket.
This entire scam would collapse if people knew just a bit more about money, but the public’s lack of financial education is startling. The fact is that anyone who survived high school can, with a library card or Internet access, learn all that’s necessary to know about saving, investing, insurance, and managing credit. Spend less than you earn; invest your savings in diverse vehicles appropriate to your risk tolerance; insure yourself, your loved ones, and your property against disaster; borrow money at the least expensive rates possible only to purchase a revenue-producing asset such as a car that will get you to and from work, a house where you can rest and live your life, or a business from which you can reasonably expect to harvest a return greater than the interest you pay.