The front page of Friday’s Washington Post
said it succinctly under a headline labeled “The End of
American Capitalism?” and it led with the declaration that “the
worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming
another casualty: American-style capitalism.”
If so, then your great-great-grandfather was correct in bringing
his socialist beliefs with him from Europe when he immigrated in
the 1920s and '30s. The article suggests that national socialism
is at the heart of the government’s remedy for the financial
catastrophe stalking the United States and infecting the rest of
the world along with it. And, if true, then it was the perversion
of capitalism that is bringing it to pass. No small part is the
ideological belief that everyone in America should own a house,
whether he has a job, an income, or can read the smaller print in
the adjustable-rate mortgage he has been encouraged to sign. That
belief is carried forward, by the way, in the “cures” for the
malaise now part of government policy. No foreclosures, no
evictions; the government will guarantee the banks’ rewriting of
these little subprime promises. Taxpayer money will take care of
it.
That the mortgages were chopped into small pieces and fed among
financial institutions, backed finally by so-called “swaps” that
made rich men even richer, is dismissed in the zeal to make
everything right again. Our only shortage, then , may be
government printing presses. American capitalism was doomed not
through any intrinsic flaw, but rather by the flaw of greed
infecting those who practiced it.
The wounding of American Capitalism is accompanied by another
malaise — the demise of individual capacity for work, for
getting things done. This is evident in the failure to accomplish
simple feats in the business place such as answering the
telephone. Nearly all offices now have a “menu system,” that
offers a variety of answers to all but the question the caller
had in mind. Somewhere at the end of the electronic maize may, or
may not be, a means of securing a human being to which the query
might be posed. But there is no guarantee that this “real person”
has any of the answers, or is inclined to be an efficient helper.
I was reminded of this in trying to order the expensive NBA
package for the coming season from my satellite provider. An
afternoon of calling revealed several “real people” who had no
idea of the subject, to whom a basketball was a foreign object,
although the provider has supplied the expensive service in the
years past. Ah, but I was forewarned and forearmed.
At the turn of this century, having seen the deterioration of
service, phoned, ordered, delivered, you name it, I had some
T-shirts printed with the simple phrase across the front: “It
Can’t Be Done.”
One day, waiting for a prescription to be filled, a woman
challenged the declaration on my shirt and we chatted a moment. I
didn’t really need to defend the motto after a clerk finally
flagged the woman down to inform her that her prescription could
not be filled that day, perhaps tomorrow, but then… She praised
the motto, in complete agreement.
I am wearing my T-shirt as I prepare to call my brokerage firm.
