An Open Letter To George Will
Mr. Will,
As an avowed social liberal, I consider you to be an important voice, not because we see things the same way but because we don’t. I am a keen admirer of your intellect, as I possess a sharp intellect as well. I am nowhere near as educated nor as well read as you, and I am constantly being educated and enlightened by following your train of thought.
Having said that, I have become disturbed with your recent inability to complete a thought. Your columns will start off on a sharp tack, then veer this way and that, then sort of slow to a stop. No coherent development, no walloping final point.
I’ve noticed a tendency amongst social conservatives such as yourself to assume the burden of defending capitalism. Although I understand that social conservatives fancy themselves fiscal conservatives, what I see is an unbridled defense of free enterprise. In other words, Convervative seems to equate to Capitalist. Thus, you collectively have demonstrated that you feel a duty to represent free enterprise in its best possible light in this, perhaps the worst of times.
What I see is that you have undertaken an impossible task, and will likely be undone by it.
Your Sunday column in the Washington Post today clearly calls for government to get out of the way and allow business and industry to cast aside workers, and to greatly reduce the income for those they keep, in order to regain efficiency.
If you are as analytical and skeptical as I believe you are, then you will at some point question whether or not free enterprise capitalism is the best we as humans can do. You will ask if the pain and misery which batters untold millions during economic slowdowns is an acceptable price for economic renewal.
You will ask yourself if our labor and material resources are really being used as wisely as possible. And while you are wondering that, you will ask yourself why this economic system has no use for 9 percent of its potential labor force which is ready and willing to show up for work, if asked. You will, if honest, acknowledge that you consider it acceptable to allow this number to grow.
You will ask yourself why the essential elements of human life: food, fuel, shelter, health care, medicine, are also the most expensive, and thus out of reach to some extent for more than a quarter of the population of this country.
You will ask yourself why more than two thirds of all workers are one or two paychecks away from poverty.
I will ask you this: Would you consider it elitist to defend policies which inflict pain that you will never have to endure? Would that not be a perfect definition of the term?
Imagine this: ABC fires you. WashPost/Newsweek fires you. Your syndicate drops you. Nobody will pay you a penny to publish a word you say.
Your savings lose all of their value. Your home plummets in price and you can’t profit from selling it, but you can’t afford to keep it.
You have to walk away.
Far-fetched, of course. There is a certain momentum to your life that only a sex scandal could derail. But what I want you to do is imagine it. The question is: what would you do next?
Now, imagine a 50-something factory worker, making perhaps $50,000 a year, with perhaps 25 years toward a nice pension. Then his company goes broke and he is out of a job. The pension fund is also broke and therefore worthless. He can’t find anything like the work he used to do. He finds himself in late working life, with no education which has any value in the job market, and no chance whatsoever to make even half of what he once earned.
My question for you is: What did he do wrong?
November 30th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Hey Walt,
As you do, I greatly respect George Will. I believe that his is a great American mind, and not just a great social conservative one. In that belief, I can almost assure you that he has made the assessment of a purely capitalis government’s affect on the “workers” that support (actively, not philosphically) that system. He knows it’s shortcomings, and even it’s inherent lack of morality. But at this point he is, as the saying goes, “in too deep”. If he were to not champion the cause of the capitalist/conservative movement, he would be saying all the books, speeches, and columns he has written were wrong. His body of work becomes invalid, and he goes from spokesperson, to persona non grata in one Limbaugh tirage. I truly believe he knows the truth you presented, he just can’t handle the truth.
As for the last part of your example, “He finds himself in late working life, with no education which has any value in the job market, and no chance whatsoever to make even half of what he once earned”, if the goverment does dig us out of this economic pit by providing more access to wealth for the common worker through labot intensive employment, pundits like Will will actually suffer that fate.
November 30th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Dwayne,
It is never too late to repent.
I will never stop believing that an intelligent human being can’t have an epiphany.
As to the rest of what you wrote, I agree. He’s in as deep as Rush, Hannity, even Krugman and Friedman. They’ve all taken on the task of trying to convince us why a dinosaur can’t (and shouldn’t) become extinct.
As I wrote, it is an impossible chore.
Thanks for your comment, sir. Always a pleasure.