One thing which has marked the last two decades, and it’s as true for ordinary people as for our leaders, has been a sense of impunity.
Democrats complain often of how the Bush Administration displays impunity. The rules don’t apply to them. They make up their own reality. The President cannot break the law.
We talk a lot less about our personal impunity. We can buy what we want. We can walk away from our debts. We don’t have to make hard choices.
Democrats most fear talking about the impunity inherent in their own positions. We’ll get out of Iraq on our own schedule, and stay in Afghanistan "to win," they say. We’ll give ordinary people tax cuts and raise spending on health care and education.
The end of all this impunity is a big theme in our current crisis and all of us — Democrats, Republicans, consumers, businesses — remain in the denial stage of the process.
Last week’s biggest story may have been Joseph Stiglitz’ (above) estimate of the Iraq war’s cost — $3-5 trillion. (It’s all here in his book.) The figure seems unimaginable so let me put it into perspective.
It’s going to cost the U.S. its autonomy. It’s going to cost our currency. It’s going to cost you your life savings, and me mine. It’s going to end the era of American impunity.
What that means is just starting to dawn on real policymakers in the real world. Asset prices are falling, inflation is rising, and the Federal Reserve can’t fight both simultaneously.
You drop interest rates to fight recession and you bugger the dollar —
a Euro now costs $1.50 and you’ll soon get fewer than 100 Yen to the Dollar. Inflation makes it impossible to keep cutting rates anyway.
Stiglitz blames Alan Greenspan for this,
but it would really be better if we all looked in the mirror. We have, all of us, acted with impunity these last decades.
We have
bestrode the world like a colossus, as a nation and as consumers, and
we have made a great mess of everything we’ve touched.
The world is overheating because we refused to conserve energy,
preferring to kill all those who opposed our aims. We did that. We
chose that, repeatedly, election after election, year after year. We
avoided our domestic problems by putting over 1% of our citizens behind bars, moving to ever-more distant McMansion suburbs, and putting everything on our credit cards with no thought of repayment. (Picture from The Atlantic.)
We don’t save, we don’t consider consequences, we don’t care about the
rest of the world, we act as though we’re immune. But we’re not.
I began writing about this end of impunity with The Chinese Century,
an alternate history story which merely accelerated the changes now
taking place and saved me for a central role. But the economic trends on
which the story was based were not fictional. They are all too real.
And I’m not now a rich man in South Africa, I’m still a lonely writer
in the wilderness.
I have done everything possible to be ready for what’s coming, but I
know, in fact, that I’m no more ready for this than I was for the
dot-bomb, 8 years ago, which left me entirely unemployed.
Now we’re
all going to face hard choices:
- How can you fight crime when you can no longer afford prisons?
- How can you fight aging when you can no longer afford our health system?
- How can we renew growth when we can no longer afford our education system?
- How can we be a world power if our currency is worthless?
- How do we get along from day-to-day if our savings disappear, if
the government can’t help, when everyone who wants a gun can get one,
and hunger begins to stalk the land?
It will take more than talk of change and hope to get us through the
next few years. It will take real change, a complete re-arrangement of
our politics, our attitudes, and our economic lives.
- Stop consuming and start producing.
- Stop importing and start exporting.
- Stop fighting there and start defending here.
- Stop pretending we’re the world’s ruler and become world citizens.
- Stop talking about freedom and start giving it.
- Stop with the I, start in with the we.
This transition will be extraordinarily difficult to make. We’re
talking about changing the assumptions of 300 million people, replacing
impunity with humility. And proving to the world that we have indeed
changed, that we have learned our lesson, that our better angels now
rule us, and that we will no longer pretend to be "exceptional," or
"different," or "unique", ever again.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is just as true for nations as
it is for people. That is the inescapable lesson of this era. It’s the true nature of the current crisis.
What suffering will be required to teach this lesson? We’re about to start finding out.
