“Great events never have minor omens. When great evil occurs, great good follows.” So says Nichiren, founder of the largest sect of Buddhism practiced in the United States. While it would be an overstatement to characterize the entirety of the Bush administration years as great evil, there certainly has been plenty of it. Greed, lies, torture, imperialism, etc. At the same time, can there be any doubt that but for those evils (and the collapse of the economy, attributable in part to administration laissez faire policies), Barack Obama would not have been elected this year. Not sure about the “great good”? Consider the response to his election from ordinary citizens here and abroad. Consider the response from leaders around the world. Look at the faces among the thousands of supporters at rallies and celebrations. White, black, brown, yellow. Young, old, rich, poor, gay, straight. Compare those faces to the tiny crowds present at the McCain rallies. A diverse, large tent versus a tiny, exclusive tent. Which is the “real” America–the small-town, small-minded, “your bedroom is my business” members of the GOP (Grumbling Obnoxious Partisans?) or the hope-filled Democrats and Independents that are tolerant of differences, are tired of ideological polemic and are a mix of ethnicities?
Tags: 2008 election, hope, McCain, Obama
November 15th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
It amazes me that anyone can apply the term laissez faire to Bush’s policies. There is absolutely nothing that I was able to do under the Bush administration that I was not free to do before. At the same time, I could no longer visit the library, call a friend in Paris, cross the nearby border into Canada or fly on a commercial airliner without severe restriction or the possibility of surveillance. This very post may well be scrutinized by someone whose salary is paid with my tax dollars. If Nichiren were alive today he might very well be spending his time at Gitmo. He may have been short of food and fuel on Sado Island, but believers could write to him and even visit him.
Barack Obama is a highly intelligent man, a great speaker and one with a talent for bring people together. But his vote for the trillion dollar bailout shows that he has no clue what is wrong with the economy. As to the war, will he have the guts to end it? I hope so. What do you think?
November 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am
So what do you think is wrong with the economy? I too am dubious about bailouts but I am far from a fan of libertarian market forces. When I mention laissez faire policies, I don’t believe I am off on a fringe or in a minority viewpoint. In the context most people put a discussion of regulation versus deregulation it is all a relative argument associated with how much scrutiny and supervision is applied to “business decisions.” Two issues seem to me to be at the forefront of the problem–a large measure of greed untempered by any sense of ethics (that is, if you can lie, cheat, steal to get ahead that is OK). The exorbitant salaries paid to executives, while obscene and annoying, are not the core of the problem; it is the techniques employed to artificially create wealth and game the economic system without creating anything of value–credit default swaps, “insurance” on the swaps, subprime/stated income loans, maximizing short-term gains over long-term development. I am very encouraged by the signs of a very efficient and pragmatic assemblage of personnel by Obama. But I remain convinced that political and economic decisionmaking is no panacea; the real hope for a better world lies in kosen rufu whereby more people see the workings of cause and effect rather than ideology or financial gain.
November 28th, 2008 at 2:50 am
So what is wrong with the economy? A big question and one that is not possible to answer in a few words. I would like to refer you to an article I read only today. I knew the author, Walter Block when I was a grad student in New York and he was working on his doctoral dissertation in economics. Here is the link: http://mises.org/story/3225.
In the article he refers to the book Economics in One Lesson, a short, but elegant explanation of the subject written many years ago by Henry Hazlitt. He also references works by Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. I knew Murray in the 70s and he was justifiably regarded as the leading exponent of Austrian economics, the laissez-faire school that you have a low regard for.
If you want to criticize laissez faire on the basis of George W. Bush’s policies (or even Ronald Reagan’s) you are engaged in straw man argumentation. Advocating a free market does not mean an endorsement of fraud or deception. What we are experiencing today is far from the workings of a free market. Instead it bears an ominous resemblance to too the economic policies of Mussolini which were known as fascism long before that term took on its ominous post Holocaust meaning. Mussolini’s fascism, later adopted by Hitler involves a close partnership between corporation and state. This is what we are seeing in America today and this is not the workings of a free market.
In a truly free market individuals would be free to conduct their olives and their businesses any way they chose as long as they respected the rights of others to do the same. In a truly free society, lying, cheating, and stealing are illegal and treated as such. If a business made bad decisions it would fail; there would be no government bailout option. This too is cause and effect.
I don’t know how long you have been looking at the economic health of the nation, but there has been a lot of bull thrown around for a very long time. I remember when we began to lose our industrial base and the rationalizers said that we were maturing
into an information based economy. We would be doing all the creative brainwork while those low-paid Asians would take care of the grunt work. Sure.
How could anyone believe that for a minute when those same Asians were graduating from American colleges at the top of their class? Then we found out that Indian programmers could replace Americans at much lower cost. Surprise!
Meanwhile America became the greatest debtor nation in the history of the Earth and China, once our arch enemy, is now holding all the cards.
Then came 9/11 and since then people incapable of objective thought have been parroting that ridiculous refrain, “Everything changed after 9/11.” That may be true but not for the reasons given. Shortly after the World Trade Center fell, President Bush uttered one of the most absurd sentences I have ever heard, “They hate us for our freedom.”
Ever since then Bush and company have been dismantling that freedom with all possible speed. Goodbye to habeas corpus. Abuse airline passengers. Abandon posse comitatus. Scrap the Bill of Rights.
While writing this post I happened to find the following sentence in an article on the Homeland Security website,
“Through a gradual erosion of the act’s prohibitions over the past 20 years, posse comitatus today is more of a procedural formality than an actual impediment to the use of U.S. military forces in homeland defense.”
We may not be far from seeing streets patrolled by soldiers with automatic weapons demanding to see our “papers”
You speak of “ideology” which is an interesting word. I believe in cause and effect. I also believe in individual rights which include property rights as well as freedom to think and believe as you wish. Pragmatism is an enemy of these principles. A pragmatist can say that freedom is nice, but hey there are terrorists out there. If you fall for that line, the terrorists have won. On the other hand, what right do we have to invade other countries that have not threatened us.
Take Afghanistan. We were attacked by Osama bin Laden who was holed up in the Afghan mountains. Did we send in the 10th Mountain Division to wipe him out. We did not. Instead we attacked the Taliban who we had recognized prior to 9/11 as the legitimate government of the country. Now I don’t like the Taliban’s philosophy (ideology, if you prefer), but we cannot wipe out every less than utopian government on the planet. In fact we should start by working on our own.
Then we invaded Iraq and justified the invasion with the most blatant lies. Any moron could see that the country was an artificial union of three groups that didn’t like each other very much. That union was created by the British and held together by a tyrant. Did we stop to think that without the tyrant, things would come apart? Did we plan to replace the tyrant? Were we prepared to accept the division of the country? No. No. No.
And, of course there was no threat.
I too am working for kosen rufu, but at the same time we need to be aware of the growing threats to our freedoms and our prosperity. Josei Toda may have attained enlightenment in prison, but how much better it could have been if the Japanese people could have seen the evil of the path that the militarists were taken?