We the People: Living on the Edge—Part II

Do you remember the Plymouth, Oldsmobile, or Mercury?  How about the De Soto, Hudson, or Studebaker? Go back further to the REO Speed Wagon, not the rock group but the pickup truck. Think now of options travelers had “back in the day” about choosing an airline. Consider how many no longer exist, like TWA, Eastern, and Allegheny Airlines.

On one flight from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia on Allegheny Airlines, I was seated next to a priest. We struck up a lively conversation about faith during which I quipped his last act, in case we crashed, would be to administer last rites to me. Obviously, I had no need for his ministrations, but it made the flight memorable.

Allegheny Airlines became US Air, then US Airways, and eventually was subsumed by American Airlines. The others, like the automobiles, either went defunct or were taken over by a larger carrier. That spelled the death knell for competition among airlines. And, I daresay, the joy of flying and stylish cars.

Do those memories bring back warm, nostalgic feelings for the Good Old Days—GOD, if you will—the era when there was serious competition that gave consumers options and kept prices relatively low and when consumers generally enjoyed reasonably great service? Ancient history. We’re now commodities.  

For the past fifty years, our system has steadily gone out of whack. Economic insecurity is now palpable due to a multitude of factors, with the Wealth Gap being atop the heap. In place of stability and security are instability and insecurity.

Home prices along with rising mortgage rates are discouraging potential homebuyers. It’s not only having financial impacts, it’s also taking an emotional and psychological toll on first-time home buyers, especially young adults who now question the American Dream. For some, if not many, food insecurity, exacerbated by escalating grocery prices, has become a fact of life. That causes shoppers to cut corners by substituting unhealthy processed foods for nutritional ones, which in turn compounds health insecurity.

We’ve become an insecure people. Even middle to upper middle class folks are only a step away from ruin due to a job loss or health crisis. It happened before, and it can happen again. To think otherwise is delusionary.

Like you, I strive to live within my budget. Many, though, are struggling to make ends meet. I’m particularly empathetic to them because I lived there once. When I was a boy, mayo and ketchup sandwiches were sometimes lunch and cornmeal mush was dinner. And darned socks were part of my sartorial wardrobe.

In my previous essay, I asked whether capitalism is like democracy, being the worst system except for all the rest. Two related questions: Are we mere pawns in a free market, thus at the whims of market movements? Or is it more about manipulation by the mega-wealthy and mega-powerful?

I offer two reasons why neither socialism nor capitalism can work in their pure forms. Both are grounded in human behavior. The first is how the tension between competition (capitalism) and cooperation (socialism) is a driving element of the human psyche. The other is the unseemly aspects of human behavior that Christians list in their list of Seven Deadly Sins, greed and envy chief among them.  

The choice between the two economic models is not binary. It must be a mixed economy: capitalism with a socialist twist, like we have with Social Security, Medicare, and the VA.

But that system is being chipped at and is in danger of going the way of the Hudson, Studebaker, and TWA. And the unstable terrain we’re functioning in, economically and politically, is not sustainable.

With the status quo being untenable, logically that demands change. Which leads me to re-ask the other question I raised in my last piece: What to do? 

Our Founders asserted in the Declaration of Independence “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” They also asserted “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” their form of government.

Completely abolishing our political-economic system would be the worst idea, but reasonable ideas about altering it should be listened to and considered. And the Constitution provides the mechanism to effect such changes.

Ideas and opinions vary, often widely, so the process would be messy. Nevertheless, it’s up to us, We the People, to figure it out.

Our history and posterity demand it. Besides, it’s in our cultural DNA. Americans don’t back down from a challenge.