Comment: Thanks America, Greed is good again

Way back, when I first attended an after-work social gathering in the USA, I did so with a pretty waitress I had asked out to fulfill a dare. The first stranger who came up to me introduced himself with the words “Hi, I’m Jacob. I earn five figures, how much do you earn?”. Being rather classically British, my retort was “Good evening, I’m Robin – and what I earn is none of your damn business”. Ten years later things had even changed in Britain with the arrival of the Margaret Thatcher era, where money meant everything.

Of course, my new friend at the party was not really to blame. The American dream is largely founded on the selfish and wholly superficial pursuit of material gain. It was only later, in the nineties and post millennium era, that other values began to pervade society and eventually the workplace. Americans learnt the delights of paid holidays and maternity leave and, in more recent times, that it is possible to enjoy paid sick leave – as long as you earn the right first by staying well long enough each year. Yet, soon enough, US wellness programs were being used not only to encourage healthy life-styles, but also to compromise personal privacy as an employee’s health data was shared with commercial sponsors. After all, everything has its price.

The US election has not really ushered in a new era, but reinstituted an old one that never really went away. Obama -care, was a glorious anomaly that was always going to be vulnerable to the peevish desires of middle America that resented subsidizing the 15% of Americans who could not afford the high costs of conventional US healthcare insurance. It is all strangely ironic, as what US patriots claim to be the greatest nation in the world cannot even meet the welfare standards of Europe – or even some third-world countries.

So in the words of Gordon Gekko, “greed is good” again. It is smart to evade taxes and if your business rivals prove difficult then let it get personal and declare “nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” For it is now OK in America to even threaten violence with impunity. At least if you are loaded, a big enough fan of yourself and say it in a crudely veiled way.

But Europe has its own mini-version of the “you are what you earn” philosophy. One of the biggest complaints made by people in eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union was that social welfare declined when nice capitalism came ambling along and liberated everyone. Those in the UK continue to this day to believe that their national health system is the best in the world, even though it falls far short of systems operating in many European continental countries. Then, whatever happened to workplace childcare? Why is the take-up of parental (even paternity) leave so low amongst men in most countries – even where it is a generous statutory right?

But something will eventually have to give in the world of work, if nowhere else. We are all a decade – maybe two – away from a brave new world where automation will have crept into every corner of the workplace. There will just not be enough jobs to go around and pay will no longer be a valid or practical mechanism for the distribution of wealth in society. I guess those who keep their jobs could continue to rate their status in monetary terms, but for the majority of the populace other values will be necessary if they are to preserve any personal dignity. So maybe the Trump election marks the death throws of something hopefully outdated and increasingly irrelevant. In that thought I am with the ever-wise Blaise Pascal who once said “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Or maybe, if the Second Amendment people truly take over then – looking on the bright side – we are all dead in the end.

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