The Choice

They say there are three kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can’t.

Before I go any further, I’d like to tell you a story. This came to me several years ago from a gentleman who owned a bike shop. He said when he started the biggest maker of 10-speed (or, I suppose, multi-speed) bicycles was the French company, Peugeot. After a few years people started asking if certain features could be made available on multi-speed bikes; things like higher handlebars, a bigger seat, and knobby off-road tires.

He took these requests to his Peugeot representative, and the rep told him flatly; “That is not the proper way to make a bicycle.” And so the shop owner asked the rep from a small Japanese company, Shimano, that made bicycle derailleurs. His reply was; “How many do you want?”

Now, Shimano is the biggest manufacturer of bicycle derailleurs, and Peugeot is a small niche company, at least in this country.

Isn’t that interesting?

The thing I think is most disturbing about politics is how heavily invested people get in their chosen candidate and party. And most people I know who are political junkies, or even relatively politically aware, claim to be open minded and are willing to consider every candidate.

But the truth is, in 95% of the cases you can tell well ahead of time at least what party they are going to vote for in the Presidential election. Even if there’s evidence to suggest that their personal ideals and goals would be better served by the other side. I know this from personal experience. Early in 1984 I was wrestling with whether to back Gary Hart or Walter Mondale in the Democratic primaries. People who know me and my views might be surprised to learn that.

I know Democrats who cannot bring themselves to believe that the economy actually improved during the Reagan administration, or that it was Republicans that put the Civil Rights Act of 1964 over the top. I also know Republicans that insist that financial markets should be completely deregulated, in spite of the evidence that this is exactly what led to the great depression, and all the little depressions that preceded it.

Why it bugs me is that it keeps people from reading this. I am not trying to stir up the troops on “my side,” and I’m not trying to proselytize from the other side. I am trying to find out if my reasoning is any good. And I am actively trying to get intelligent people whom I respect, and there are many, to read this AND give me some feedback. This is how I’ve learned and grown over the years, and I’m not done yet.

So anyway, that was the big buildup to what I’m thinking about now. But before I get to that, a little history.

The political system we live under now has its roots in the post-Roman European model. The de facto leaders in most communities were the families that owned the most land. And most families, of course, tried to have a lot of kids. This was because kids provided help around the place, and also gave the parents somebody that could take care of them in their old age.

And so it became the tradition in the more well-to-do families to give one son over to public service, and another for the priesthood. This helped to lock in the authority this family enjoyed for the next generation.  It was also their way of "giving back."  This was called the Cavalier Aristocracy.  It's where leaders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison came from. You could also argue that John F. Kennedy comes from this tradition.  All these men gave up wealth to serve.

I think it’s safe to say that it’s not only Western civilization that looks to its more elite members for leadership. It’s logical, really. You want to be a winner, you hang with winners. Back in the day, it was the landlords and the church that led. The landlords, because everybody worked for them. You might think the church, because of devotion to God. But as much – or more – than that was the fact that the church used to be the only place one could get an education.

So it is the wealthy and the educated that lead. And things go smoothest when they're on the same page. Eventually, the landlords became Lords, royalty, and formal governments were formed. These, over time, went more toward the Roman model, and now the standard is a representative form of government. But it’s still the elite that populate the halls of government.

And as for the church, their influence has waned, but the influence of the educated class has not. That is because education has become more widespread. And yet there is still an elite among the educated, and these are the people who get called on by government to help lead. Woodrow Wilson, who was President of both Princeton and the United States, is a prime example. Condoleeza Rice came out of academia to serve in several administrations, and there are many others.

That is the choice we are looking at in this election; the landlords and the scholars. Mitt Romney represents the Capitalists, and Barack Obama, the Professors. There are endless ways to frame this. The Pragmatists and the Theorists. The Fat Cats and the Eggheads.

Mitt Romney’s core was probably best expressed by Charles Erwin Wilson, who said; “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Or, as Calvin Coolidge once said, “The business of America is business.” The United States has a free-market capitalist economy. If business is allowed to do business, the wealth it generates trickles down to everybody. Refer, please, to the collected writings of Barry Goldwater, Jack Kemp, and Ronald Reagan.

Barack Obama and those who inspired him believe this system is inherently unfair. They believe that business needs to be strictly regulated and that wealth needs to be more evenly distributed. They believe that business should be exposed and called out every time they make a product that is unsafe, or pollutes, or is made by people who are paid very little and treated very badly. Ralph Nader would fall into this category.  They also believe, deep down inside, that the world would be a better place if there were one government presiding over the whole world.

Karl Marx in “The Communist Manifesto” states that history will inevitably lead to a society where everyone works together for the common good. Communism might be better called “Communalism.” As Archie Bunker once said, “If you live on a commune, you are a commune-ist.”  There is a lot of truth to that, and if you read Marx it looks great on paper.

For a picture of what pure socialism looks like, watch Star Trek. This franchise shows us a world where there is no money and everybody does what they feel they’re best at. Writers write, musicians play music, science geeks become scientists, people who love food become chefs. It’s to be assumed that the plumbers all love working with pipes and water, and that ditch diggers love to dig. The point is, nobody has to have a job they don’t like, and everybody has enough, because whatever you need, somebody else loves to make and provide it.

Of course, advanced technology will eliminate a lot of the less desirable jobs. Ditches would be dug with phasers from orbit, I suppose. Modern technology has already come a long way toward eliminating things like books, magazines, and newspapers, so nobody would ever have to work in a dirty, noisy, dangerous printing plant. The things writers write would go straight to digital. Kind of like this, now that I think of it.

One of the biggest differences between the capitalists/fat cats and the scholars/eggheads is a theory known as the zero-sum game. Basically, this is the belief that there is a certain amount of value to everything in the world, and that sum never wavers. On the surface that sounds ridiculous, but please, dig a little deeper with me.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have a pile of dirt. Not very valuable, from the looks of it. Ah, but you discover that a lot of that dirt is iron ore. You separate the ore, smelt it, refine it, and voila, you have steel. Now it’s become more valuable. Then you take the steel and make something out of it, and it’s more valuable yet again.

And yet under the zero-sum model, you haven’t increased the value of the whole, just one small part. That pile of dirt is but a small part of all the world’s resources. When you increase its value, you decrease the value of everything else proportionately. If the whole world is worth $100, the pile of dirt starts out being worth $0.01. Make steel, the dirt’s value increases to $1.00, so the rest of the world is now worth less; $99.00 as opposed to $99.99. Make a bridge, the dirt – including the steel in the bridge – is now worth $3.00, making the rest of the world worth only $97.00. Follow?

So by this model, all the technological advances in history, all the knowledge gained by the study and manipulation of the natural world, all the exploration ever done, has only redistributed the wealth of the world, not increased it. We have also increased the number of dollars in the world, making each of them worth less. So the original $100 is now $1 billion, but that billion is only worth what the hundred used to be. We’re simply calling the original value something else now and dividing it into smaller pieces.

To follow this logic, in order for the world to be fair, that wealth has to be taken back from the people who have benefitted from all that study and work and creativity and given back to the rest of us for whom living on a pile of dirt is our fate.

The landlords/fat cats/capitalists tend more to believe that the potential for wealth is infinite. I will agree that there are rich people who seek to gain wealth by exploiting the poor, but we’ve learned that insisting on things like a 40-hour work week, child labor laws, environmental and safety standards, and a minimum wage have not diminished the potential for wealth. If anything, it’s expanded it, because now the capitalist industrialists have more customers, who live longer and are happier.

So this piece is not meant to sway you into voting one way or another. It’s merely designed to be an examination of the deeper motivation of each side. Hopefully, it will help you understand the people that you look at and shake your head over, thinking; “How the hell can they be like that?”

The choice we’re being offered seems quite clear to me. Do we follow the scholars, or the businessmen? Or, might there be a third choice? Might it be possible to make both of them follow us? Maybe there are more than two choices after all. I think this is what the Tea party and the Occupy Wall Street movements are all about. If you think that we, the people can have more influence over our nation, then maybe you should think about which side is more likely to give us what we really want, which is a strong economy AND a more responsible society. More cars, less pollution.  More customers, less exploitation.

Which brings us back to my story about the bicycles. One rep felt he knew more about how to build a proper bike than the people who weren’t buying them. The other wanted to do business. The first fellow probably thought that, if they just took what Peugeot made, one day everybody would see the wisdom of it and thank them. The other rode the wave of mountain bikes and got rich.

I would like to recommend a very enlightening book to all my friends. It’s called “Twenty Dollars A Gallon,” by Christopher Steiner. No matter who you agree with, you owe it to yourself to read this book.