In a land with no speed limit on economic growth, how do we hit the brakes?

A long car trip is an American summer rite, a chance to glimpse the continent's natural splendor on the fly. But if you're not a fan of smog, cell phone towers, and runaway sprawl, the journey becomes more trroubling by the day. As described by one roving economist, the country's natural splendor and love of fairness are threatened by inequality and environmental decline. It's time for ordinary Americans to look deeply into both problems, he says, and get the the nation back on track. -- The Editors

My wife, Karen, and I left Portland, Oregon, in late April last year and spent five months driving about 9,000 miles through 16 states. We visited 13 national parks, 7 national monuments, and towns large and small. We walked on streets and hiked on trails, talked to people, read local newspapers, watched local television, and shopped in local markets. We observed the economics, politics, and ecology in the places we stayed. What follows are some of my impressions.

The ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey haunt the contemporary United States. Marx, the 19th-century German social philosopher, needs no introduction, but perhaps Abbey does. He was born in 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a small town about 30 miles from where I was born. A novelist, essayist, poet, and radical environmentalist, he lived most of his adult life in the desert and canyon country of the Southwest. Among his best works are Desert Solitaire, a 1968 nonfiction account of a year he spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now a national park) north of Moab, Utah, and The Monkey Wrench Gang, the 1975 novel that inspired a generation of militant environmentalists. Abbey died in 1989.

Marx argued that capitalist societies tend to exhibit poles of wealth and misery, with each pole tightly connected to the other. This theory has been dismissed by mainstream thinkers, who argue that while there might have been some truth to it in capitalism's early years, the advanced capitalist countries have shown that all boats tend to rise on the tide of the system's incredible economic growth. However, if we look at the United States today, nearly 140 years after the onset of full-scale capitalism in the 1870s, we see that Marx's prediction still has a lot of life in it.

Marx was speaking of relative misery -- that is, how those at the bottom compare to those at the top. Workers create profit by their labor, and the capitalists take this profit because they own the workplaces. If the workers aren't organized, employers will squeeze more and more profit from their labor, making the workers worse off over time. Growing inequality is a consequence of uncontested employer power. When workers do organize, both at their workplaces and politically, they can control and have controlled the growth of inequality.