Let The Bailout Games Begin

Let The Bailout Games Begin
by Jack Criss

You really almost have to laugh to keep from crying.

Industries and businesses are lining up to get their government bailouts. Business is bad, they lament, and we need help. Billions of dollars worth of help. Where will this money come from? No one really knows—that question is put off for later. This is a national emergency, an unprecedented crisis, we’re told. We must act first and think later.

Can the businesses doing the begging slash their own budgets, maybe take some pay cuts or delete some unnecessary expenses? Well, no, not really. It’s not their fault, you see. It’s this economy, and Bush, and China, and the whole wide world, actually. Besides, blame is unproductive during the crisis. We must receive help to continue on as we always have and keep up a façade of normalcy and productivity, the executives wail. If not, the country will suffer. Detroit and Wall Street are symbols of America, are they not? They must survive. At any expense.

I’m an entrepreneur like many of you. I have lost my shirt many times. I have made terrible business decisions more than once. I wasn’t born into family money nor do I have a man in D.C. or in Jackson who can deliver favors. I survive by taking my case directly to the customer. I have to watch my reserves, if any, as diligently as I possibly can. Never will I have the resources and power like the major corporations and industries begging for federal aid. Yet this is what they are doing and will continue to do. Everybody is on board for the bailout games---everybody. Democrats and Republicans alike have signed up for the money and parrot all the justifications given.

Let me be clear: I don’t want federal money. I don’t want to take my neighbor’s money to prop up my business if I can’t make it on my own. I would deserve to fail and find other work. Yet that is what GM, Wall Street, the newspaper industry, the porno industry, the state of California… just about all the big players are asking for taxpayer-generated money to prolong failing business models.

What we’re witnessing on an unprecedented level is government paternalism as its most flagrant and, possibly, most dangerous. It is not just the “have nots” or the “underprivileged” who must have government assistance we are told; no, today any industry or company that is struggling---for whatever reason; causes are irrelevant---is requesting help, demanding it in many instances and, most ominously, are expected to ask for it. It is the norm in the new, state-sponsored economic reality of 2009.

Autonomy, therefore, is quickly vanishing in this nation, from the individual giving up on paying his credit card balance to the Wall Street firm begging for billions. Any default or negligence in your business model is seen as a claim to federal assistance which, of course, means money siphoned from taxpayers or worthless notes printed by the Federal Reserve to be paid by future generations or China.

What will happen, though, when there are no taxpayers, i.e., when those who still produce and make profits are all begging for assistance themselves or simply closing shop? With the economy sliding as it is, many companies attempting to survive on their own merit are finding it increasingly difficult to do so. Before, these businesses had to compete with others in their field; now, they also have to compete with their own government, the same government that may be financing their competition. Is the game being rigged where you have to get paid to play?


Nudge, nudge

There is a trendy new ideological movement in vogue at the moment, hailed by Democrats and Republicans alike and gaining momentum in our universities’ social science departments. It is called “Nudge”, named after a book by the same title, and one of the book’s co-authors, Cass Sunstein, will head President Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Dr. Sunstein was an advisor to Mr. Obama during the campaign, as well, a prominent member of his inner circle.

While couched in pseudo-individualistic jargon, the book “Nudge” represents an endorsement of government paternalism in ways once thought unimaginable. Sunstein and his co-author, Richard Thaler, lay out arguments by which the government and private sector (an antiquated term today) can improve people’s choices by manipulating the “choice architecture” they face. Call it B.F. Skinner with a smiling face.

One would have thought such flagrant attempts at government paternalism might be greeted with outrage or, at the very least, chuckles. Well, one would have thought that many years ago. In today’s America, however, where bailouts are becoming the norm, morality is whatever can be gotten away with and responsibility is playing along and not making waves, “Nudge” has become all the intellectual rage.

We can rule people’s lives not by brute totalitarian force, this theory says; instead, we can treat them like children or farm animals, dangle the carrots and squeak the toys, and they will do what we want them to do. According to the authors, most Americans are more like Homer Simpson (impulsive and easily fooled) than homo economicus (rational, cool and calculating). They write, “One of our major goals in this book is to see how the world might be made easier, or safer, for the Homers among us.”

Implicit in the Nudge theory is that government and social planners know what’s best for the individuals living in the United States. They don’t, obviously, but the fact that our top executives, highly educated and well-heeled men and women, are defaulting on their autonomy by begging for bailout money, tells me that this nation may be as meek and docile as Sunstein and Thaler believes it to be.

Those who know the history of government intervention will no doubt realize that, in time, “nudge” will become “shove”, and people will be forced to do things that are deemed in the best interest of the community, the nation…the state. Things such as bailing out failing companies and who knows what else.


“Knee Jerks”

The arguments offered in defense of the bailout frenzy are so weak and circular that it’s amazing they get any traction at all. Of course, sadly, most citizens are ignorant of economics so perhaps it’s not surprising. The worst defenses, however, may be those submitted by the so-called defenders of the free market. That has been a surprise.

John Allison, former CEO of BB&T Bank of North Carolina and erstwhile Ayn Rand devotee, said his company “had” to take the federal monies. If they didn’t, he whined, the other banks that did receive the cash would get an unfair competitive advantage.

And while Governor Haley Barbour said Mississippi may have to take some of the stimulus package bailout money he didn’t want to take it all. I applaud him for the courage to even show that much backbone; however, one national critic fired back at Barbour, admonishing him for taking this semi-principle because, he railed, “(Barbour) will only hurt Mississippi but not taking all the money.”

In both cases, a prime example of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Meanwhile, too many free market defenders worldwide are behaving like “knee jerks”, as I call them, looking only at government to blame while giving businesses a free pass. There is no doubt that government intervention, especially in the market, is damaging. No honest student of history or economics can really challenge that fact.

The market, though, because it should be free, must allow for human errors and mistakes. Sometimes big ones. I and others argue that people should be allowed to correct those mistakes even if it takes years. Regulators, on the other hand, insist on immediate new laws on top of laws, which then encourage cronyism, inflation, and nationalization, i.e., what we have now. Nonetheless, free market advocates cannot become social utopians as we have long accused leftists of being. The big business community has let us down this go around: most didn’t speak up. They mouths were shut even as their hands were out.


Run Along, Children

Free markets require intelligent adults who understand risk in business and prepare for hard times. There are no guarantees. Sometimes you do have to ask for help but you ask it from family members and friends or you reconfigure and approach investors to aid you through incentives that will benefit them, as well. You cut prices or vacations or some other expense. In other words, you do whatever is necessary in a private, freely cooperative manner.

In this recent crisis, though, we have witnessed the obscene spectacle of corporate executives acting worse than the caricatures made of them by many in the media: company loyalty has been thrown out the window along with concern for the employee and the customer. It’s all “Give me mine and to hell with the rest”. When Ayn Rand praised the “virtue of selfishness” she meant rational self-interest not childish, cutthroat narcissism. In business, selfishness properly means making as much money as possible but only by producing and creating products that people will pay for. It’s not very rational to act as a hack parasite of the federal government to keep your golden parachute. Being subsidized is not capitalism.

It’s a jungle out there right now. Those of us who didn’t ask for all the daily economic headaches are having to deal with them anyway. Even if we did want a bailout it won’t be forthcoming to businesses like Profiles Mississippi or yours. I will reiterate what I mentioned in the last issue: what we have to do is take care of each other, support each other and do business with each other as we see fit. Wall Street and the Beltway won’t take care of us nor should they. Let’s take care of ourselves. Not because there’s a law, a nudge, a bailout or a command. Because it’s the right thing to do.