Village People

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

By Judd Grossman

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-In the spirit of our country’s new collectivist leadership, I’ve been working hard sticking my nose into other people’s business. I’ve honed my neighborly prying skills here in Jackson Hole as I reflexively keep a running tally of how many cool toys, nifty vacations and second homes are accumulated by residents of Jackson Hole’s affordable (read: subsidized) housing. Now I’ve gone national.

I have become intimately concerned about how much government money Merrill Lynch’s CEO, John Thain, spent to redecorate his office ($1.2 million), and my smugly snarky “I told you so” regarding those folks who have overreached on their mortgages has turned into a “What the hell!” now that I’m being asked to help make their payments. The new social mantra is “It takes a village,” but frankly, most of us made the conscious choice to leave our claustrophobic family homes and villages, to strike out on our own, to find a bit of privacy and independence in an effort to avoid such invasive scrutiny.

But dependence is the name of the game in Washington. As President Obama and Congress create programs that bail out banks and automakers, and modify mortgages, there is a great deal of polite applause for what has been “accomplished,” but when government spends money to manipulate markets, it may accomplish something, but it doesn’t create anything. It simply imposes an artificial shift of resources from one part of the economy to another.

The ability of the government to efficiently allocate resources is dubious at best, and the byproduct of all this intervention is a moral corrosiveness eating away at America’s gut.

Not only is there universal public distaste for the use of taxpayer funds to prop up failing corporations, but even programs with strong “feel good” potential, like loan modifications, trigger a swirling undercurrent of discontent among the majority of taxpayers who are being excluded from access to this new gushing spigot of government spending. As Rick Santelli expressed so passionately in his recent tirade on CNBC, “The government is promoting bad behavior … We need to reward people that can carry the water instead of drink the water.”

So, most of America is gathering around the water cooler to discuss who’s drinking the water. We are the unhappy victims of a government with a Robin Hood complex.

The taxpayer’s first inclination is to resist this manipulation of the market, trying to fend off the thief. Failing that, the next impulse is to try to do what it takes to be the recipient of the government’s ill-advised largess. We find ourselves bellowing hypocritical - though rational - cries of outrage: “Why are you using my money to reward failure?” and then “Where’s my piece of the pie?” Frustrated in our efforts to halt or benefit from the madness, all that’s left us is bitter resignation, and an unhealthy fixation on the shenanigans of those who are the recipient’s of our unwilling generosity.

There is a role for government in the markets: to prevent and punish theft and deception. That much is ethical. But beyond judicious oversight, government intervention is inherently unfair. I believe there is a fundamental justice in the way the free market rewards hard work and good decision-making. When government acts to “level the playing field” through corporate or individual bailouts, it acts immorally under the guise of compassion. There is a proper balance of compassion and justice, and it is our fate as a nation of individuals to struggle to find it. Letting the disabled starve is not justice, but neither is there true compassion in the bailing out of the greedy or the foolish.

We are becoming a village of nosey neighbors, or maybe just a household of jealous siblings jockeying for the doting attention of an increasingly aggressive nanny-state, and it’s devilishly entangling apron strings. PJH
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