Shared sacrifices inevitable

Friedman and Mandelbaum’s remarkable diagnosis of America’s decline in, That Used To Be Us, opens at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China in 2010.  It was held in the sparkling new Tianjin Convention Center, a center of over 2.5 million square feet that was constructed in eight months.  The authors contrast that accomplishment with the inability of Washington’s Metrorail authority to repair broken escalators in its Bethesda station. 

To drive the point home the authors state, “ We are nearly complete in our evolution from Lewis and Clark into Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam”.  Many Americans believe that the 21^st century will belong to the Chinese.  And, thus, our job is to imitate them.  Right?  No, say Friedman and Mandelbaum. They believe what we must to do is recapture our ability to take large actions on a collective scale.

They believe that America’s slow-motion decline has four root causes:  We have lost sight of how the world has changed and how we must adapt to that change, we have failed to address education, debt, and energy and climate change, we have stopped investing in our nation’s formula for greatness, and we now have a political system that is paralyzed.

In other words we have lost our self-confidence and we’ve gotten lazy. 

When we won the Cold War twenty years ago we wrongly assumed that the clear and present danger to our supremacy was gone.  We were wrong.  We’ve missed how rapidly the world was about to change as billions of people began to practice capitalism.  A worldwide explosion of pent up aspiration for prosperity replaced the demise of the communist threat.  Missing that reality was a colossal American blunder.

Friedman and Mandelbaum believe that the new world in which we live poses four central challenges:  globalization, the Information Technology revolution, our massive national debt, and the threat of our reliance on fossil fuels. The authors state that we have responded to these four challenges “with the vigor and determination of a lollipop”.

There is no way that we can respond to these challenges without collective sacrifice.  For example, the debt can’t be reduced without our being willing to accept reduced benefits AND paying higher taxes. In addition, as unpleasant as it is to accept, we will also have to realize that higher fuel bills will be GOOD for America. 

Thus, national sacrifice is inevitable.  The debate will be about how it is to be shared.

That debate, the authors believe, should focus upon America’s five pillars of prosperity, all of which involve partnership between government and the private sector.  They are:  our inadequate system of public education, our crumbling infrastructure, our counterproductive immigration policy, our inadequate support for research and development, and our unwillingness to properly regulate private economic activity.

Either we will rise to these challenges, or it’s curtains for America.

To be continued.

LeRoy Goldman

September 19, 2010

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