The Last Shame in America
(Page 3 of 4)
July / August 2003
By Perry Glasser, North American Review
RELATED CONTENT
Hitching a ride to the bus stop...
Prescribing an illegal drug that quells deadly cravings...
Rachel?s Last E-mail March 2003 Craig and Rachel Corrie Utne.com Web Special Last week we published...
"THE GREATEST DANGER before you is this: You live in an age when people would package and standardi...
Turn on the radio, see a movie, read a best-selling novel, walk into a card shop, and you'll be con...
The basic requisites of personal economic life do not change, but as long as the financial services industry can leave us ignorant enough to believe that money is an intimidating inexplicable mystery, we’ll pay sharpies and hucksters whatever they ask to manage our money.
This is no rant against either “the system” or capitalism. The miracles of progress and innovation made possible by constitutional democracy coupled with open markets—mechanisms to gather and concentrate capital for further growth—are undeniable. But the system today is being undermined as insidiously as any terrorist might hope. In the end, our shame about money endangers our personal freedom. Open markets presuppose information accessible to buyers and sellers; they thrive on transparency. Turning back an odometer is a criminal offense. Real estate agents are required to disclose defects in property. In an open market, an industrious buyer can find out the valuation of every house on the block and can learn the price of any make or model car in any newspaper.
So why should it be a social transgression to ask the guy in the next cube what his salary is?
The shame surrounding money is therefore more than a cultural quirk. It occludes the open market and by doing so strikes at the foundations of capitalist democracy. Individually, we are vulnerable to being screwed, but in the aggregate our identification with Corporate America perpetuates political and social misery. Consider the results:
Our government equates corporate triumph with national triumph and collaborates with military dictators and gangsters because order, however brutally imposed, safeguards business profit. Despite soaring worker productivity, we continue to link health care to employment, and so the fear of disease and infirmity accelerates the corporate flywheel. We work more hours to make more dollars to take on credit-card balances to buy more cool crap. We delay marriage and children long past the optimal biological hour because we are terrified to miss the corporate career boat, leaving losers with baby carriages waving farewell at the dock. And for the generation just joining the workforce, busyness and stress are equated with power and status instead of being recognized as the surest road to premature death and loveless lives.