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friend of mine who is an actor tells me that when two actors encounter
each other in the street, their usual salutation is not: "Good
morning!" or "How ya doin'?" It is much more likely
to be: "Are you working?"
The rest of
us had better start getting into that showbiz mentality. Ladies
and gentlemen, we are in a recession. I know this because I have
what I think is called "a leading indicator." Until recently
I was a systems manager for a Wall Street firm, hiring and firing
programmers and analysts. As NRO readers well know, I am an amiable
and open-hearted sort of guy, so I stayed on good terms with them
all, even the ones I fired. Well, this past few weeks the e-mails
have been trickling in.
Hi, Derb!
Remember me? I coded up that cost-of-carry data model for you
back in '98, the one that got us a pat on the back from the CFO.
Then I moved on to Supertronic Systems. Well, guess what? — Supertronic
just laid me off. Know any openings? Got any contacts? Wd really
appreciate a lead. We are all fine — new baby boy last March!
Love to Rosie & the kids.
At such times
I get the Captain Ericson feeling. If you have read Nicholas Monsarrat's
The
Cruel Sea — the best WWII novel I know — you will recall
that Ericson is on the bridge the night his ship, the corvette Compass
Rose, is struck by a torpedo. Among the many sounds that followed,
there was one that particularly distracted him, coming from a voice
pipe connecting the fo'c's'le, where the torpedo had hit, with the
bridge. It was the screams of the men in the fo'c's'le, trapped
and drowning in pitch darkness: "[A]n agonized animal howling,
like a hundred dogs going mad in a pit... But there was no help
for them: with an executioner's hand, Ericson snapped the voice-pipe
cover shut, cutting off the noise." Sorry, guys.
What do you
do in a recession? Depends whether you are one of those who get
recessed or not. If you are among those unlucky ones, you fire off
e-mails like the one above, send out faxes and phone calls, hustle
and network, max out the credit-card lines, cancel magazine subscriptions
(uh-oh) and hope for the best. If you're not, but are in the sea-lanes
where the U-boats are known to prowl, you try to stay above decks
as much as possible, kiss up to the Captain, and say your prayers.
(Old Chinese proverb: "When times are good, people don't burn
joss: When times are hard, they hug Buddha's foot.") If you're
safe and dry on shore, you get your house fixed. Building contractors,
down there at the bottom of the food chain, suffer a sort of magnifying
effect from economic ups and downs. Remember trying to get your
roof mended back in '97? How you had to keep calling them? And when
they finally deigned to show up, how you had to grovel to them,
make coffee for them, let them play their vile godawful music at
earsplitting volume while they worked? How they walked off with
half your tools and left scraps of roofing fabric all over the lawn?
Well, try hiring them now. They'll be round in a jiffy, work as
quietly as church mice, clean up the lawn afterwards, and even,
if you casually mention it, mow it for you afterwards!
And who are
these people who don't have to worry about recessions? Why, they
are the government people. I don't know how it is in your neck of
the woods, but out here in Suffolk County, the term "power
couple" is defined to be a cop married to a schoolteacher.
And that's just while they're working — you don't even want
to look at the retirement packages their Godzilla unions have negotiated
for them from the trembling guardians of the public fisc. Private
enterprise? Fuhgeddaboutit. Recession? What recession?
Don't get me
wrong — readers always do when I go on one
of my rants about the government people. We need cops. We need
schoolteachers. Probably — what do I know? — we need Assistants
to Administrative Assistants (Grade 3.2c) in the U.S. Department
of Administrative Assistance. God bless them every one. I do not
want to shoot all public-sector workers, nor even (except on bad
days) put them in camps and feed them oatmeal gruel. I only want
to point out...
Well, I don't
need to point it out, since Calvin Coolidge pointed it out once
and for all back in 1925, in a speech to the American Society of
Newspaper Editors. Newspapers, said Cal, are great business enterprises
earning large profits and controlled by men of wealth. In defense
of that connection, he went on: "After all, the chief business
of the American people is business." You all know that bit.
In subsequent remarks that never get quoted, he added:
The accumulation
of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. ...
So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not
greatly fear it. ... It is only those who do not understand the
American people who believe that our national life is entirely
absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact
that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much
more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong
an element in all civilization. The chief ideal of the American
people is idealism. That is the only motive to which they give
any strong and lasting reaction.
This great
and noble conception, so beautifully articulated by one of the most
thoughtful of all Chief Executives, is America's unique contribution
to human civilization. The business of this country is business:
not as an end in itself, but so that, sufficiently wealthy to have
the leisure for reflection, Americans can lift their eyes from the
brute struggle for survival to contemplate higher things and help
others.
Unfortunately,
in their zeal for fairness, justice and equality, Americans have
in recent decades thrown a lot of wrenches into this wonderful wealth-creating
machine. In one of my recent dispatches from China I wondered aloud
why cell phone service is so much more expensive in America than
it is over there. The answer was emailed in by a reader who actually
runs a cell phone company:
It is ... very
expensive to run a cell phone company. FCC Licenses: In the U.S.
providers pay for these. In many countries the wireless providers
are given the rights to the frequency. We don't really pay for the
rights, we collect extra money from you to give to the FCC/U.S.
Gov't. Cell Sites: These are controversial towers. Not only are
they expensive to build and maintain, the NIMBYs out there sue us
every chance they get. We got sued by a lady who claimed the cell
tower we had a couple hundred feet from her house gave her kid a
brain tumor. Unfortunately, we had to pay our lawyers to go tell
her and the judge that the site had never even been powered up....
Regulation: There are hundreds of small government agencies that
can shut us down when they feel like it. It is impossible to keep
up with the regulators in every state. Iowa has a commission that
makes sure we are not disturbing the historical heritage of the
state. So does Georgia. Vermont? We hired a team of lawyers who
specialize in building towers in Vermont. Unless you fill out your
applications and pay a "fee" (bribe) to these [expletive
deleted] bureaucrats they shut your whole system off. 911: Unfunded
mandate. Develop the technology and deploy by October or else...
Not so much
labor-intensive as lawyer-intensive. There, in one corner
of one industry, you see, naked and exposed, the Iron Triangle that
shackles and retards business development in the U.S.: Taxation,
Regulation, Litigation.
There are,
of course, plenty of people who know this and fight against it.
I draw your attention to just one such group: The Club
for Growth, which agitates for less government and lower taxes,
and offers help and support to pro-growth candidates for public
office. I went to a bash they held last June to commemorate the
Reagan tax cut, and found myself sitting there listening to the
speeches, thinking: Why would anyone not be with these people?
I suppose a New York Times editorial writer would imagine
the participants at such an event to be smug, overfed cartoon capitalists
— monocles, cummerbunds, cigars, avoirdupois — taking a ten-course
break from grinding the faces of the poor. Well, there were a few
cigars, but very little smugness and not much excess body fat. My
date for the evening, venture capitalist Jim Woodhill, is as fit
as a fiddle. He needs to be: financing software start-ups is strenuous
work. Jim has more, and more imaginative, ideas for lifting poor
people out of poverty than ever are dreamed of in Ted Kennedy's
philosophy. He has thrown a lot of his own time and money into those
ideas, too. Many of the other people in the room that evening have
done the same, in the same spirit — the Coolidge spirit, the American
spirit.
Recessions
come and go, bubbles swell and burst, the business cycle turns.
Its troughs would be shorter, though, and its peaks higher, and
its recoveries stronger, and the good that American capitalism
does would be more widespread and more firmly established, if American
business were not dragging that clanging, banging, ankle-chafing
Iron Triangle along behind it.
Correction
In one of my pieces from China I committed a misspelling. I used
the term "the gumment" to refer to the maleficent author
of all our economic woes, attributing this word to Washington
Times columnist Fred
Reed. A number of fellow Fred groupies e-mailed in to point
out that in correct Freddish the expression should be written: "the
feddle gummint." My apologies to Fred down there in Mexico
(Come back, Fred! Your country needs you!) and to all lovers of
correct spelling, grammar, and usage everywhere.
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