A fascinating story in the September 9 Washington Post tells the tale of a come on practiced by some DC-area car dealers: Come on down and win $30,000 in cash! Or a Silverado truck! Or a flatscreen TV! Or a voucher for 150 gallons of gas!
Now, granted, the odds that anyone would win any of the first three items was, well, 250,000 to 1 (you had to read the very fine print to learn this). Still, 150 gallons of gas, at today’s prices, not too shabby! Except that, when Allen Farrar tried to cash in that voucher, he found that “he had to pay a $5 registration fee, buy $100 worth of the same brand of gas, then send in the receipts and other paperwork to FreeBeeGas.com to receive $25. To obtain the full $150, he would have to repeat the process five more times” (quoting Post reporter Annys Shin).
Whether the local car dealers actually made some cash off this hustle is unclear, but the Post, which carried ads for the come-ons, certainly did. Naturally, when Shin called his/her employer, s/he was rewarded with a big, fat “no comment.”
And so it goes with today’s capitalism, particularly in the U.S., which seems bent on doing what the left could not do, which is to destroy itself. Certainly every principal in the ongoing subprime mortgage debacle lived through the dotcom boom-bust of the nineties and saw how smart people tried to turn a good thing into a perpetual-motion money machine, transforming everyone into not a millionaire but a billionaire in a decade, and how, when the limits of growth had been reached, mere hype turned into outright deception and the whole thing fell apart.
But now, less than ten years later, we’ve gone through the whole thing again, with far more serious results. In theory, it shouldn’t have been too hard to predict that housing prices couldn’t increase by 20 percent a year forever, that in a decade the average American home would be worth $2 million. But the powers that be just kept shoveling on the coal, because for the vast majority of capitalists, “capitalism” simply means “that which gives me the biggest yacht in the harbor.” The big shots at Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Lehman Brothers weren’t just driven by greed, they were blinded by it and ultimately corrupted by it.
The killer, of course, is not that they were powerful and corrupt, but they were powerful, corrupt, and incompetent. Nobody loves a loser, and today’s big shots are losers.
Willy-nilly, the U.S. is evolving into what the right wing used to hate, a European-style social democracy where the government has the explicit duty to look out for the little guy, regardless of fancy economic theories. After all, how can business say that big government is bad, when they’re the ones begging for government aid?
I find this doubly depressing because I don’t trust big government. I don’t like the endless subsidies that government doles out to everyone who needs help, because everyone needs help, pretty much, even though the only source of the cash is, ultimately, ourselves. We get richer through increased productivity, not through subsidies. But if capitalism insists on blowing itself up, how can we criticize government for picking up the pieces?
