What Does Progressive Mean Anyway?
When I was a child in the twenties there were no liberals as best I could tell. There were socialists, especially writers, that vaudevillians loved to have hanging around, even though vaudevillians were far too entrepreneurial in spirit to ever really buy in, it was the socialists who often provided the rhetorical excess that vaudevillians thrived upon. My father would say there is a great difference between knowing how things actually work and knowing how things aught to work. He thought that the socialists were brilliant on the score of how things actually worked and were a bunch of numbskulls when it came to how things aught to work. This distinction was apparently completely lost on the socialists themselves.
But my childhood quickly passed, and as with the vaudevillians themselves, you won't find much in the way of entrepreneurialism during a depression; lack of resources seem to blind side these fools, who are marvelously brilliant only during times of stability and at least modest prosperity. Once again, counter-intuitively, it is the aught to that they are not very good at. Socialists and entrepreneurs are both highly dependent upon what is rather than what aught. So liberals who really come into their own when what aught to dominates flourished during my early to mid adulthood creating a stability and prosperity that the conservatives could only have wet dreams about. The problem with people whose strength is in what aught to be, is that they are clueless about screwing over the good that all their hard effort created in their ever search for more things that aught to be. Whatever the best of intentions were, that is what happened in the sixties in my opinion. Liberals just are not good at preserving the good while they continue their creative adventure, with the result that my latter years have been spent in a wonderful entrepreneurial excess, taking the stable and properous and throwing one hell of a party for themselves till they found themselves blind sided once again with less and less to be excessive about.
So now we come around to where we are. It seems that there are no socialists left; it is thought by many that they ignominiously died at the Berlin Wall. If true, this is too bad. It would be very helpful to know where we actually are at this point and time. Don't bother asking the entrepreneur who is only good at knowing what's going on when everything is going fine. It is a foolish question to ask the liberal even if willing to answer to that label, but given that liberals are embarrassed by the term, it will prove doubly useless. One is left with the impression that all concerned believe that the sooner we get past where we are the better.
This brings us to the new guy in town, who like most new things is actually as old as Moses: the Progressive. Oh, what a ring that has to it: the implication of progress imbedded in the notion that one personifies it. So you can imagine my surprise when my grandson hands me a paper by this economist who heads up the Obama team entitled: Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story. At first I thought it must be a George Carlin monolouge or something. But no such luck. It is written with all too sober and straight a face with words that say what they mean though lacking the embarrassment that should be inherent in the fact that they mean what they say. If you don't believe me, look here:
http://www.americanprogress.org/kf
/walmart_progressive.pdf
The gist of it from my non-economist mindset is this: there is no greater good to be had in life than that race to the bottom paragon of eonomic virtue known as low prices. That these low prices are on the backs of human beings struggling to get on in life is a recognized issue by this master of the economic universe. The question is not the existence of the problem but the thoughtless solutions proposed by those who know more about sitting around campfires singing Kum-By-Ya than about the ever beneficient sacred cow of low pices. Given its august status (in his mind anyway) low prices can not even be put on the table as part of a solution.
So we are left with WalMart profits that as incredibly high as they are will not make a sufficient dent in the needs of 1.3 million WalMart workers. We are left with the fact that WalMart is actually under a lot of pressure and is now very much a victim of its race to the bottom mentality compared with other retailers. Yes can you believe it, Mister Jason Furman has the audacity of hope that we are all dumber than dirt and forget that the retail environment that makes WalMart just one of many cut-throat retailers is the product of WalMart's own invention, the product of its success. Poor WalMart is forced to live with retail pressures that it created. Where the hell is my hanky when I need it.
Ok, what we are really left with is that the rest of us should pony up to the bar and bail WalMart out with ever greater government earned income tax credits and medicare and the like. Now mind you, at first blush there is absolutely nothing wrong with this as a stop gap to a permanent solution. I am all for tax credits as a quick way of "making work pay". The problem is Furman ends it there. He seems to think the American people will buy on to the notion of a permanent second class citizenship for millions of its fellow citizens paid for by their taxes so that the WalMarts of the world can happily go on screwing these fellow citizens. If there is any lesson learned by the sixites experiment in government largesse it is that it can not be sustained in the long run. Government handouts will never equal empowerment. It can not end there for the simple reason it can not sustain the goal in the long run.
Furman hides the obvious solution within the untouchable low prices. MalMart for all its faults actually has propagated enormous efficiencies throughout the entire retail sector that Furman himself writes benefited the economy to the tune of over 264 billion in 2004. A small fraction of that amount returned to the worker through higher prices is ALL that is required to rectify the problem. But the solution would require the one thing that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both shouting the loudest about just before they died, that welfare must only be a stop gap on the way to personal empowerment. That idea died with both them and liberalism and any chance at arriving at the what aught to be that is liberalism driving force. It was the entrepreneurs of the eighties and nineties that gave a short rebirth to the idea, but they were out of their depths because any entrepreneurial endeavor depends upon you already having the wear-with-all to accomplish your task, being a product of what is rather than what aught to be.
This new Progressive time will have no meaning at all if it doesn't take up the hard challenge of not what is, but what aught to be: the empowerment of those for whom work doesn't pay to truly earn (as opposed to be given) a living wage.
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