weekly response

Doing The Wrong Thing
By Leo Brown
[President Obama's Weekly Address]

Since I'm still here, I'll pass along a news bit of interest from the UK. There's been a row with Argentina, apparently, about the status of the Falkland Islands. The Falkland Islands were uninhabited until colonial powers started bickering over them in the seventeenth century, and not much has changed since. Today, a few thousand Brits live there, but the Argentinians feel sovereign, as the islands rest on their continental shelf.  This all resulted in a war and hundreds of deaths in 1982. So, the question has been kicking around certain circles of London: are these islands really worth it? Why not just repatriate these southerly Brits and end the madness?

For one thing, there might be oil there.

This week, President Obama paints with broad strokes, his narrative of the past decade grounded in morality and "American values like fairness and responsibility." When some of us strayed from those values, our society was punished with a housing crisis and financial collapse.

The President could make just the same policy proposal - providing financial assistance to responsible homeowners who were swindled by the financial industry - without the tale.* But it is election season now, a time of oversimplified scripts that blame a faceless enemy (or an incumbent president) for the nation's woes. For President Obama, especially as the Occupy movement resonates and a campaign against Candidate Romney emerges, bankers and investors provide an excellent moral foil.

President Obama is practiced in making a case based on "doing the right thing." He, as so many American politicians, speaks often of "American values." Perhaps such platitudes from all angles are what have made it so difficult to muster a coherent exchange of ideas.

American values? What are these, and what do we Americans have in common that might endow us with a set of values? Not a common heritage, not a common religion. Our cultural chaos, if anything, might be our most legitimate claim to individuality among nations. Some things that we do have in common, such as democracy and freedom of speech, are no longer especially American. Other things, such as the deranged consumer culture that we export like opium, America could do without. The treasures and shames of our local folk cultures are hardly universally shared or understood.

Fairness and responsibility? Our nation may have been founded upon these ideas, but they are far too subjective to use as a basis for a policy argument. This has been proven time and again, with politicians of all stripes crooning to their bases about "doing the right thing." Because we have so little in common, there is no consensus on what the "right thing" is, so naturally, nothing is accomplished.

On the other hand, we might accomplish a great deal if we seriously engage a popular question of today: what are the government's actual responsibilities? More specifically, what is the government legally obligated to do? As much as I'd like the government to act morally, I know that sometimes it won't, according to my personal views. Put another way, I know that it usually hasn't, and I'm not foolish enough to expect moral justification to suddenly swing in my favor.

I don't expect that Congress would suddenly function if we stop posturing about morality. But it couldn't hurt. And maybe then, once we've acknowledged the absence of a moral consensus about anything, our government could return to its proper business of providing citizens with the services we are willing and able to finance at tax rates that don't favor the oligarchs.
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*But who is really responsible when a big bank deceives an uneducated homebuyer and bets on their failure, all while managing to obey the law?