The Real Economy Isn't Ideological

The city of Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania, has just filed for bankruptcy protection. A fairly unprecedented move, it will likely be repeated a number of times before we finally learn our lessons about rebuilding a productive economy. Such developments might finally help us in understanding what the idea of “public” really means.For so long now we have been taught that as citizens we must learn to negotiate between what is public and what is private – the only two options we are granted. The popular view was that the term “public” was the domain of politics, where we had to deal with taxes, elections, civic responsibilities, etc. The “private” world was really about everything else, and in recent decades it has increasingly become the domain we favour. In it we play, invest, work, travel, worship, consume, and basically do whatever we want.For years now there have been concrete attempts to force us to believe that these two things stand in opposition to one another. We are encouraged to think of the state as “it,” but the private dimension is defined more as “us.” We see the state as a vast expanse of coercive power but the private domain as freedom to follow our own pursuits.Interestingly, in all this the free market proponents have allied themselves on the side of the private forces, when in fact they are now showing more social clout than most governments could ever muster. They would have us believe that it is the free market that actually provides us choice, income, security, while the public domain is ever attempting to reach into our pockets or legislate something else that would curtail our private pursuits. We have bought into this for so long that it remains difficult to imagine any other paradigm. It has effectively pitted the citizen against their government, when in fact they were created to be government’s defining and driving force.This past weekend just blew that historic view out of the water. In cities across Canada, the United States, and around the world, citizens are rising up against corporate power because they perceive that they’ve been sold a bill of goods for too long and their respective nations have become financially dysfunctional as a result. Like government, the free market can be a force for good or ill, but it is nevertheless a force. It has exceeded its mandate for years and spent much of its energies attempting to convince citizens that government was really the force keeping them from prosperity. Yet the more governments themselves responded to this by endless rounds of tax cuts and the selling off of public assets, the situation only got worse. For a long time we continued beating that dead horse, until the most recent financial meltdown got governments to do the corporate bidding and trillions in public finances were used to bail out the private domain’s excesses.The favourite political mantra used by so many candidates that we have to “trust government” or “trust the people” is becoming passé.  The problem we now see is a third entity – corporate greed. For decades governments were demoralized, as were the people they were meant to serve, because the fabulous wealth being generated was filling neither government nor citizen coffers but ever-rapacious desires of the corporate domain.The demonstrations in the various countries this past weekend have introduced us to a new reality and it would be helpful to us if we came to terms with our new partner in our collective pursuit for more financial justice and equity – government. As in 1929, free enterprise left its better judgement behind and entered an all-out feeding frenzy that saw no end to high-risk investments and money made on money rather than products. The population in the U.S. eventually opted for a president and a government as their only hope of setting things to rights. In Arthur Schlesinger’s words, Franklin Roosevelt was elected “to save corporatism from itself.” And the way he did that was to limit its excesses and channel its amazing energies into public infrastructure projects that raised employment and built the foundations for the amazing era of growth that was to follow.What we are witnessing at present is a muted citizen revolt against the false economy, not the real one. It lacks a certain definition but it has a point. And it could get much bigger as citizens build on their efforts to build a more equitable society. They are fighting for a better way of life by asking governments to do more, not less – to regulate, to fight poverty, to seek more fiscal balance, to help build the middle class once more.The real economy isn’t ideological, nor does it pursue false dichotomies. It is interested in distributing wealth in measures that lift all boats and not just those expensive yachts. Private pursuits of greed are now ripping the sinews out of the public domain and it’s time to stop buying into the false assumption that public in the form of government is bad and private in the domain of corporatism is good. We require both, but at the present the private sector is running amok. It’s time to rebuild the public domain again. The real economy both understands and supports that because it’s the best way of getting the most resources to most people. It refuses to permit the Harrisburgs of the world to fall victim of a capitalism gone mad.