Was John Edwards on to something? Regardless of what you think of John Edwards the person or John Edwards the trial lawyer, John Edwards the politician may have been on to something with his focus on The Two Americas, one America for the wealthy and one America for everyone else. Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland (formerly of The Financial Times and a frequent guest on all of the cable news outlets) pens a blog post titled America’s two-speed economy, quite similar to Edwards’ concept of the Two Americas.
The quote from this piece that stands out is the one that essentially sums up our problem in a nutshell:
Yet [CEO of Applied Materials Michael] Splinter’s critique contained its own contradictions: on one hand, he called on the government to spend more on R&D and education, but his chief complaint was that “frankly, our tax rate is not competitive” and that it was likely to increase.
Unless we change our culture from one of entitlement to one of responsibility, the fear of America turning into Brazil, which was raised in the article, will become a reality. It was harsh to use Brazil as an example, considering Brazil has a booming economy and Brazilian companies are buying American companies very aggressively. That said, there is known to be a wide income gap between rich and poor in Brazil (as I’ve witnessed firsthand in India, the other country mentioned in the Slate article.) I’m not knowledgeable enough about it to discuss the culture of responsibility in Brazil but I know whenever there is any talk of communal responsibility versus individual liberties in the United States, we hear misplaced screams of socialism and communism from the right. I’m all for individualism but we have to develop a mindset that we hold our individual pursuits in check if they come at the expense of the society in which we live.
This requires ethical standards, that cannot be applied by a government policy, to become the social norm. Unfortunately ethics are usually not profitable and therein lies the rub. Thoughts?
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