Citizenship - "The Lost Keys of Democracy"

Sometimes I wonder if we’re not like the fellow who lost his car keys in the parking lot and was poking around under the street light in an effort to locate them. When someone asked why he wasn’t looking around his car that was a far way off, he merely responded, “It’s easier to see here.”Every time we question why our modern society, which generates so much wealth, can’t seem to provide either an equitable or sustainable way of life in the process, we hear from the “economic experts” that such things as smaller government, the privatization of services, lower taxes, especially for the corporate community, and less regulations will eventually get us to that promised land. Well, it hasn’t and it doesn’t. Yet over and over, knowing we have lost some important qualities in this country, we head back to the spot where the economists are shedding some light and accept their prescriptions. Such things take us nowhere near where we need to be, but we accept them anyway, believing that economic realities are just far too complex for us to comprehend.The United Nations recently stated that, despite numerous financial gains, the world is less equal than it was even a decade ago. Gaps are now growing within countries and between them. China, India, the U.S., Britain, and, yes, Canada – all these nations were witnessing the growing gaps even years before the recent financial meltdown. Actually, when you take out the rather phenomenal economic growth in only two countries – India and China – inequality has been growing since the mid-1980s. Nevertheless we are consistently being instructed to toe the line, to trust that inevitably everything will work out. With more wealth being generated than at any other time on this planet, how much longer are we as citizens going to permit the unified voices of global economics to keep us searching under the street light when the solutions we seek are elsewhere?Harvard University’s Dani Rodrik describes this predicament this way:

Globalization’s soft underbelly is the imbalance between the national scope of governments and the global nature of markets. A healthy economic system necessitates a delicate compromise between these two. Go too much in one direction and you have protectionism. Go too much in the other and you have an unstable world economy, with little social and political support for those it is supposed to help.”

Isn’t this what we have at present? Don’t we as citizens feel we have absolutely no control over what transpires? Aren’t citizens themselves supposed to be the collective moral conscience of modern democracy itself? Then how did we end up like this? Truthfully, we voted for it – plain and simple. We end up voting for the very parties or individuals that follow the “Chicago Boys” and their prescriptions for modern economic growth. We were encouraged to borrow and spend, accepting the prevailing view that we have too much government already, we are being squeezed, and we require lower taxes. In doing so we play right into their hands, cutting ourselves off from that one institution that alone has been authorized to democratically deal with our collective challenges – government. Some love to pursue the argument that private enterprise is far better at giving us the world we want than government. Really? Really?  But that’s not really the argument anyway. There is only one legitimate institution, constitutionally grounded, and representatively chosen that is appointed to provide overall direction to our national welfare – governments and their representatives. And we’re in the process of cutting them off at the knees so that they really don’t have the resources to bring about reform in such fields as the environment or healthcare. Political parties themselves possess neither the courage nor the inclination to call for better, more accountable and, yes, larger governments to deal with our problems that are global in scale.Of course a good number of people will disagree with this last paragraph, but the real issue is not a free market versus government contest anyway – it is the health of our very democracy itself. If voters choose to strip away the resources required to provide for a more balanced life, then they can hardly expect free market forces to be receptive to their longer-term wishes. There will always be inequities in any society, but the fact they are growing and steadily fracturing our national identity and citizen solidarity should be of prime importance to us as Canadians. Nancy Birdsall, founding president for the Centre for Global Development, puts it as the difference between “constructive inequality” and “destructive inequality.” The former is necessary to fuel growth and sustainability, while providing benefits to society, while the latter goes too far in permitting unfettered power to free market forces that foster division and eventually lead to political unrest.We have a question to ask of ourselves as citizens: when did we cross the line from the former to the latter? Perhaps of more urgency: what are we willing to do about it? How do we transform a destructive inequality into a constructive one? If we truly desired to stand up as a collective citizenry and say “stop - too many of our own are being hurt,” our best way of doing so is through government itself because it alone has the legislative responsibility to adhere to citizen decisions. But as long as we borrow and spend and bury our heads in the sand, government cannot rescue us because we’ve already voted against its greater capacities. We ignore old St. Augustine’s counsel at our peril: “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?”