It's the Stupid Economy

Local, state and national governments should respect and protect our human rights. According to the Declaration of Independence, "... to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men ..."

Human rights are inseparable from democracy. That is, only a democratic government thrives with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and the like. Only a democratic government will encourage and support the individual's exercise of those rights. All men and women are equal only in a society that is democratic from top to bottom.

The preamble to the Constitution says, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." That's also a pretty clear definition of the purposes of government.

As I read it, the Blessings of Liberty referred to in the Preamble are about the same as inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The term that covers both today is human rights.

Speaking of the general welfare:  In part this means providing essential services:  police, fire, courts, roads, public schools, social security, access to health care, protection of the commons from pollution and misuse, and so on. What services are legitimately on this list, in a democratic society, must be determined democratically. So far, all the above mentioned services are on our society's list.

At least since James Carville said, "It's the economy, stupid," Democratic and Republican politicians have acted as though guaranteeing growth in the private economy is a principal purpose of government. Sometimes they act as though it is the main function of government. How strange that the authors of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution forgot to mention it.

Economic growth is not the same thing as the general welfare, and it is certainly not the same as human rights. Too often, advocates of growth are willing and eager to trample human rights if exercise of those rights gets in their way.

All the essential functions of government need to carry on whether the private economy is expanding or contracting. It's certainly easier to provide for the general welfare if the private economy is prospering. Facilitating prosperity is generally a good thing, but ensuring growth for the private economy is not the primary function of government.

Our history includes long and short episodes of panic, crisis, depression and recession. During these periods, we the people need services like public schools, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. During those times, we may well need them more than during periods of prosperity.

That brings us to today (summer 2012), with its issues of jobless "recovery" (AKA supposed "job creators" who have been unable to create jobs over decades of tax breaks), declining real wages, imminent financial defaults throughout the Eurozone and the threat of austerity programs everywhere. There are issues of environmental degradation, both acute and long-term. There are also long-term issues of resource depletion. Together these make it clear we cannot forever use more and more resources, so we cannot always have a growing economy.

It's far from clear where the natural limits to a growing economy are. Unfortunately, we are finding out about some of those limits by overshooting them, with results similar to a car running over a cliff.

Chernobyl and Fukushima are examples of one type of overshoot. There are many others:  the Dead Zone that was the worst feature of the Gulf of Mexico until BP's Macondo oil platform disaster; droughts and fires that can't be denied although their connection to global warming can be denied; and a depressingly long list of smaller and larger disasters.

From the peculiar viewpoint of economists, these disasters can be seen as adding to GDP. For the real economy, they are a dead loss. Corporations may shed workers to improve their profits and their stock prices, while in the real economy, workplaces are closed and jobs disappear. Keep doing this for decades, as the United States has done, and we'll get an economic crisis - which we have had since at least 2008.

Today's economic crisis is not the same as the Great Depression of the 1930's. Today's Greater Depression will not be fixed by the same policies that fixed the first Great Depression.

There are similarities, to be sure. To start the Great Depression, a big financial bubble originating in the stock markets was popped. To start our 21st Century version, a big financial bubble originating in mortgage financing was popped. In both cases, the crisis was used as an excuse to extend corporate control of government and society by those parties - Democrats and Republicans in the United States today; Fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany then - who were in favor of corporate control in any case.

There are certainly similarities to the two eras, but there are huge differences as well. Then, resources needed to grow the economy - energy sources, iron and copper ores, food, farmland, and so on - were abundant and cheap. The environment, in spite of a Dust Bowl caused by a combination of unsustainable farming and drought, was not nearly as degraded as it is today.

Then, the crisis was primarily financial and political. Once the economy of the 1930s was sufficiently stimulated, prosperity returned and lasted for many decades. Now, in spite of a huge stimulus program, the recovery has not brought back prosperity. The mortgage crisis, instead of being resolved by letting bankrupt institutions go bankrupt, has been turned into a sovereign debt crisis that promises a continued recession.

In terms of resources, the world has changed a lot since 1930. Now, the world has roughly three times the population it did at the onset of the Great Depression. Peak oil is driving a frantic search for alternative fuels and an equally frantic search for oil in absurdly inaccessible and difficult regions of the earth. Global warming is bringing both flooding and drought, with more of each to come. Many ocean fish stocks have already collapsed and the ocean is becoming more acidic, meaning recovery is at best unlikely. There are lots of ways in which economic growth has already overshot natural limits.

The short story is, resources needed to grow the economy have largely been used up and are now in short supply. If and when the financial part of today's economic failures is fixed, we still cannot expect a peacefully growing economy. The industrial economy which always wants more is too stupid to work with declining resources. We can expect a declining economy for the foreseeable future.

What we do not want is a government that devalues human rights and disregards democracy in a series of desperate and possibly futile attempts to revive failed and failing economic institutions. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we have now. It is exactly what we are going to get, regardless of whether Obama or Romney is our next president, unless a strong mass movement of opposition can develop.

How can we resist disregard for our rights and dismantling of democracy? Any ideas, Occupiers? Comments are invited.

Art Myatt