Your Teacher Said What?! (3 page)

If you want to understand modern Progressives—and especially the Progressive wing of the Democratic party—you could do a lot worse than reading Croly. Here are a few of his choicest observations about America:

In order to govern, according to Croly, people must be shown that the “special interests” really run things, that the pursuit of profit by Haves (Croly's capitalization) is antidemocratic. It's not that Croly didn't like elites; he
loved
them, since the people didn't really understand their own best interests, and only powerful leaders could “accelerate the desirable process of social reconstruction.”

However, Progressives, true to their heritage as do-gooders, greatly prefer their elites to be uncorrupted by anything as souldestroying as money. Like, for example, the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, who told a group of women at a day care center in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2008: “Don't go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”
³

Or the president himself, who said in an interview with
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
about plans to curb the bonuses being paid to Haves in the financial services industry, “I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. . . . I do think that the compensation packages that we've seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance.”

Well, everyone hates bankers. But hardware stores?

Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot, is a regular guest on
Squawk Box
, and he sure knows when someone is insulting him. To the Obama administration, he says, people who create jobs “are monsters. We're disgusting human beings.” His cofounder, Ken Langone, goes even further. He showed up at the president's townhall meeting in September 2010 and asked him why, since a dynamic economy was so essential to growing the economy, he spent so much time vilifying the people who delivered that growth. The president responded that Ken was part of a group that had been “reckless.” Who had made “bad decisions.” And who needed “guidance” from Washington.

Sound familiar?

 

“Blake?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Have you ever heard the word ‘progressive'?”

“I think so.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Maybe . . . something about progress?”

 

If only. Actually, Progressives have pretty mixed feelings about progress. While it's true that Progressives have long supported stuff that just about
everyone
would call progress—like woman suffrage and an end to racial discrimination—and even things that at least
some
people would call progress—like stronger environmental legislation—when it comes to policies that promote
material
progress (you know, improving people's wealth, choice, and living conditions), Progressives are usually the ones pulling back on the reins and yelling, “Whoa!”
⁴

Partly this is because the typical Progressive hasn't got a clue about what actually produces wealth. This is a truism that turns out to be true, at least statistically: A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York clearly showed that the more economics classes you take in college, the less likely you are to support any part of the Progressive agenda. Breaking it down to the most basic kind of free-market thinking, this means that the more economics you know, the less likely you are to believe in the Progressive doctrine that tariffs are necessary to protect domestic jobs and that free trade hurts prosperity (it doesn't). The more you know about economics, the less likely you are to support the Progressive belief in higher minimum wages (they actually raise unemployment). And the greater your economic literacy, the less likely you are to buy the Progressive idea that governments should set prices or wages (sorry, but duh).

And, no surprise, Progressives
love
the Progressive (oops, I meant progressive) income tax. Almost as much as they love redistributing income in a way that meets their own definition of fairness, taking money from one group to pay another.

And speaking of taking money: In Las Vegas and other cities that use the mathematics of probability to separate customers from their cash, by far the most profitable “game” of chance is the one played one-on-one with slot machines: Put your money in here, and pray that more comes out there. At the very pinnacle of this one-armed banditry are payoffs that take a small percentage of the total amount of money played in a whole network of machines, tempting arithmeticchallenged players to keep pouring money into slots hoping for a million-dollar payday. Let me repeat that: a slot machine that takes money from
other
slot machines in order to promise a giant payday. The technical name for this sort of system: progressive slot machines.

Makes you think.

 

The Progressive opinions held by Blake's teachers shouldn't have come as a complete shock, but they did. Like most folks who earn a living in the world of business and finance, I spend my working day around people who take the virtues of free-market capitalism for granted. Partly this is a matter of temperament; planned-economy enthusiasts don't tend to look for jobs at CNBC. Really, though, it's the fact that people like me learned what we know about the real-world economy in, well, the real world. When you spend your days with people who are spending
their
days buying, selling, and trading, Adam Smith's “invisible hand” isn't some classroom abstraction; it's tapping you on your shoulder all day long.

For a lot of people, though (and all children), knowledge about how the economic world works is acquired elsewhere. From television dramas and comedies, for example, whose creators are so convinced of the evil of profit-making business that they depict its participants as many times more likely to commit murder or assault than, say, members of street gangs.

Or from newspapers and news magazines. When they're not tsktsking over something called “excess profits,” they're declaring “Free Trade a Casualty of Economic Crisis” (
Washington Post
) or even wondering whether we've arrived at “The End of Capitalism?” (
Time
magazine; the question mark is a nice touch).
Time for Kids
, the elementary school edition of
Time
, even wrote that “lower interest rates give people comfort that government will do whatever it can to solve [this] crisis.”
Time for Kids!
I guess it's not that shocking to find the Progressive buffet laid out in any version of
Time
magazine, but I admit I was a little surprised to see how ten-year-olds eat it up.

The reason, of course, is that ten-year-olds are natural Progressives.

Think about it: All of the components of the modern Progressive agenda are in sync with the way a parent tries to raise a child:

That's what Penelope and I have taught Blake and Scott. It's what any decent parent tries to do. Progressivism, at its core, isn't really anything but the idea that the government ought to act like a parent.

The big difference, of course, is that we're trying to
raise
our children—to turn them into adults who can someday raise their own children. The Obamacrats in the White House, the Senate, and the House and a dizzying number of bureaucrats, obedient to their Progressive instincts, want to keep the American people children forever.

So when I tell you I'm ready to rant about what they're doing to my children's future, I hope you'll understand.

 

“Blake?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Is greed good?”

“Of
course
not.”

 

Blake is way too young to have seen either of Oliver Stone's R-rated attacks on modern capitalism, but she sure understands that the signature motto of Gordon Gekko in both
Wall Street
movies is not a sign of virtue. One of the real challenges for any parent—for anyone, really—when defending free-market capitalism is the Gekko problem: the perceived conflict between spending time helping others and spending time making money. Even the free market's biggest supporters find it easier to defend the prosperity it creates than the ways in which it does so. They're likely to concede that capitalism might put more money in our pockets but warn us to make sure it doesn't steal our souls at the same time.

The money-in-our-pockets phenomenon is not very controversial, though it's usually understated. The fact is that for the 98 percent or so of human civilization that occurred before Adam Smith wrote
The Wealth of Nations
in 1776 (okay, some other stuff happened that year) the worldwide economy grew like pancake batter spreading out in a pan: It got a lot bigger—between 5000 BC and AD 1700, the world's population grew from about five million to five hundred million—but no higher. The amount produced by the average family (per capita GDP) barely moved during that entire 6,700-year period, which means not only that a weaver or mason or farmer living in Renaissance Europe didn't produce any more cloth or bricks or wheat than one living in ancient Egypt but also that the value of all that production was, in present-day terms, less than $900 a year per capita.

Today's worldwide per capita number, after two centuries of free-market capitalism, is more than $10,000 a year—and in the United States, more than $46,000.

You'd think that level of prosperity would be its own moral justification, since it measures not just how much people
produce
but also how much they can afford to
consume
; and increasing the average family's income by 1,000 percent also increases the number of years they live, how tall they grow, and how much food, health care, and education they can afford.

You'd think that. But you'd be wrong. The Obama family, and Progressives generally, make a strong (or, at least, a loud) case for the “helping” professions, as when the soon-to-be First Lady advised her listeners to stay out of corporate life and instead become teachers or nurses. For reasons that only they understand, the Progressives always
over
value a career spent providing people with charity and
under
value a life spent providing them with jobs.

Capitalism's critics are even older than the Progressive movement itself, though not by much; Karl Marx wrote
Capital
(
Das Kapital
) in 1867, only about twenty years before the start of the “Progressive Era.” One hundred and fifty years later, the opinion pages are still blaming “unfettered” free markets (by which they mean, if my dictionary is correct, “free markets without leg irons” or “free markets that are free”) for the Great Recession.

And even without those attacks, it's not easy to explain the value of free-market capitalism in a child's terms, since understanding the long-term importance of a growing economy requires a long-term view—something not exactly easy for a ten-year-old. Blake doesn't really have any way of comparing the abundance of products available today—cell phones, MP3 players, and personal computers, for example—to those available twenty years ago, much less two hundred. Moreover, Blake, like most kids (and all Progressives) tends to believe in fairness; and to her, and to Progressives, that means dividing the pie equally, not making it larger.
⁵

From this sort of thinking—that the economy is a zero-sum game where every player's gain must be balanced by another player's loss—it's a short leap to the idea that anyone who has more than anyone else must be greedy—and, as we know, greed ain't good.

On the other hand, Blake
does
love animals . . .

 

“Blake?”

“Yes, Dad?

“You know how chimps groom each other?”

“Sure.”

“What do you think would happen if a chimpanzee offered another one a piece of food and asked for help grooming as payment?”

“Depends on the chimp. If it was an average chimp, the second one would just take the food and run away.”

“Actually, they almost always act as if ‘one good turn deserves another.'”

“Why?”

“Because a chimp that just takes the food doesn't get offered anything next time.”

“Kind of like a golden rule, right?”