It’s the ideology stupid!

In the midst of what is becoming not only a real headache for “Joe six-pack” and the rest of the world there seems to be a certain degree of confusion between cause and effect. And this is not a trivial but rather a crucial matter.

Every time that our economic system enters one of its predictable crises alleged pundits and, worse yet, professional economists shine out their golden trumpets heralding to the world “it is the economy stupid!”

I am afraid that seldom, if ever, it really is. An economic crisis is a symptom of a deeper and more troublesome problem.

While many economists would love to have their fifteen seconds of fame as saviors of the world few are establishing the causality-effect that renders our crisis nothing more than a symptom of our political ideology.

A blind belief in the market forces supported by years of deregulation and a discourse intent on dissolving whatever is left from the New Deal constructed the legal framework and the social imaginary within which we managed to manufacture the current crisis.

Buttressed by a deep free-market dogma it became acceptable to seriously discuss the merits of privatizing Social Security and anything else that could be treated as a tradable commodity whose assigned market values could be traded in the secondary markets so as to broaden the credit base, while simultaneously enriching the technical complexity of the new investment vehicles and lining up with gold the packets of those who traded them without much understanding or AIG-regard for our future.

In this historical context it is, thus, hardly surprising that we as a society find acceptable to conceive that it is acceptable to trade units of retirement, health care or education as long as they yield some dividend somewhere to some “maverick” willing to take some risk in some market.

Our ideology and ensuing legal structure rewards risk-takers and our popular culture Donald-Trumps them above our mores and moral boundaries. They play in this surreal playpen until they accidentally break some of the toys and that is when we step in to either fix the problem or replace the toys with new banks... toys.

Irresponsible behavior driven by political ideology has dilapidated the political capital of the “mavericks” and their solicitous friends and supporters housed in the lower and the upper Houses, nested among the corridors leading to the legislative floors and friendly courts while avidly discussing for years-on-end financial campaign reform and the role of lobbying at some Hawaiian, all you can eat, family resort and spa.

De-facto deregulation and the resulting lingering California-spa-style moral debauchery are not economic problems; they are the root cause of them.

Serious, complex and sophisticated public policy must address the root problems first so as to begin the long road back to recover the socio-political bridges to nowhere between the working “Joe” and those who are supposed to advocate for their rights in the legislative chambers of our broken democracy.

— Luis Brunstein