I Won’t Let the Free Market Take Care of It

K is my early riser. I don’t know where he got these genes, because no one else in my family possesses them, but he’s always up before me. On school mornings, he’s likely to be watching a documentary on the History channel while leisurely eating his breakfast at the kitchen table when I stumble out of bed. Doesn’t exactly fit in with his brooding teenager visage, now does it?

Yesterday morning, as I was struggling to keep my eyes open wide enough to ensure the coffee actually got in the coffeemaker; K was watching a documentary on the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Through the monotonous drone of how farmers settled America’s heartland, received free land and began growing wheat, and the competition versus Russia to be the world’s bread basket after World War One, one tiny, offhand quote caught my attention and woke me up. It was from Herbert Hoover, and he was responding to farmers on the Great Plains who watched (with the crashing stock market of 1929) as the price of wheat plummeted from $3 per bushel down to only forty cents per bushel. They pleaded with the White House for help, and the response the farmers received from Hoover was that the free market would take care of it. Hoover would not intervene.

Capitalism had it under control, according to Hoover. Except it didn’t. And it got worse when the Dust Bowl hit the next year.

Lack of governmental intervention did nothing, and it was only the New Deal and major reforms and World War Two that got our country out of that economic mess.

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Hearing that quote made me actually formulate an opinion on the #OccupyWallStreet protests. I had been hesitant to do so before, because everything I had seen thus far had been so conflicted. Pro: Americans (who I generally consider to be apathetic when it comes to civic matters) are out protesting, and making their voices heard! Con: It doesn’t look like they have a cohesive message or potential solutions. Pro: Different groups are rallying together to strengthen their campaigns! Con: It doesn’t appear that the media or the politicians take them seriously. Pro: I consider myself to be part of the 99%! Con: You cannot actually help someone who does not want help.

If you don’t have a clear message, if you don’t have a potential solution, and if you cannot garner some attention, then what can you do? Except, as Hoover shows us—you cannot sit back and do nothing.

As far as I can tell, #OccupyWallStreet is not complaining about the lack of intervention, but the unwillingness to help, the willful refusal to reform. There has been help—just applied to the wrong places, and I think this is where the arguments arise.  We bailed out the banks. We will bail out the agribusinesses that lost crops in disasters this year. We sometimes feel bad and chuck some money at unemployment—which does reach the 99%, but most of the time, we do not help. We assume that the free market will take care of the people.  We routinely bail out corporations and the super-rich (taxes, infrastructure, placating them with anything we have just for them to keep their measly plants here and save a few jobs).

Yet, who is helping me? Is a Social Security tax rate decrease helping me? Not really. I don’t even plan to see Social Security when I retire, and I’m sure decreasing its funding doesn’t help. I’m equal opportunity—I don’t feel as if I can bank on my pension or my investments, either. I am seriously considering following my great-grandmother’s plan, which was to hide entire drawers of cash in five different safe deposit boxes in her hometown, and stock the cellar with as much canned good as she could squeeze in there.

She was a bride of the Great Depression, you know.

Unemployment would not feed my family and keep the lights on if I lost my job. The bank would not take pity on me, despite the fact that the taxpayers/legislators took pity on the banks. I would not get a golden parachute or a bail out or expect to see my debt forgiven and then have a record-breaking year of profits right around the corner. No one concerns themselves with the amount of money I am paid for my work, and yet, despite the fact that the last time gas was this expensive a barrel of crude cost over $140, it stopped trading this week at only $87. The government is propping up the oil companies, and not its own people.

This isn’t, in my mind, a matter of Democrats or Republicans (so no comments against either, or I will delete them). This isn’t a matter Presidents versus Congresses, or lobbyists versus everyone but their own interests. This is a matter of having enough people stand up and say,

“This is not working for me anymore. I am not happy. I am worried all of the time. My children will not be better off than I am. I am not realizing my American Dream. I work hard, but life shouldn’t be THIS hard. Capitalism doesn’t not care for the people; it only cares for the profit-drive.”

Once enough of us stand up and say this, once we acknowledge that unrestricted capitalism is not required for democracy, once we are actually ready to have a real and meaningful conversation about it, then we can actually move to do something about it.

I am willing to stand up and say it now.