PRIVATE SECTOR PROMISES

Former President George W. Bush came out of retirement to join the Republican attempt to consolidate the fragmented grand old party. Bush admonished us that only the private sector could produce wealth and presumably pull us out of the now nearly normalized economic crisis.

We will, however, never really know, this time around, whether Bush’s claim regarding the power of the private sector is true. We’ll never really know during this crisis, whether “we can spend our money better than the government can” as Bush chided. Why will we never know? Because the government is spending our money for us in the private sector to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars. They’ll even be spending much money we don’t have, just like the Bush Administration. We lost our chance to see if the private sector can really pull itself up by its bootstraps.

The Congress had its chance to let the private sector put up or shut up when the banks crashed. But they backed out in the end when the last 15 or so representatives in the house preferred the proffered pork over republican conservative principle which would have required opposing that first Bailout package.

It seems there are many in the private sector who don’t have the faith that Bush seems to have. He himself would have been a failed businessman if Daddy hadn’t bailed him out. All too many corporations and big farms would also be bust if it weren’t for corporate and agricultural welfare. Just ask GM and the tobacco farmers in the Carolinas.

When are we going to allow the private sector to test its power of wealth production? If the government is to blame for disrupting the private sector, why can’t the capitalist faithful just say no. After all just saying “No!” is a tactic the conservatives seem to like to use in various venues of political concern. But there always seems to be an excuse why they just have to take the public money and run. Why can’t they stay in integrity with their beliefs and commitments and just say “No!”

Seemingly, as the private sector needs more and more taxpayer money to survive possibly the crisis and the capitalists lack of faith in their ideology means that the private sector, the capitalist economy, has reached its logical conclusion. Greed doesn’t work. Competition is not sustainable. The segregation of private and public sectors is an illusion.

The new populism would be much truer to capitalism and to the conservative insight that “the accumulated wisdom of the past can only thrive [in the context of] traditions and customs, i.e., as ‘lived realities’ internalized” in communities, not as the dictates of governmental bureaucracies and exploitative corporations.