Now I know there’s nothing I could say that would be more likely to get anonymous bloggers foaming at the keyboard.
But I am convinced this is true. No, I am not talking about collective farms, slave labor camps, and forcing everyone to share an apartment and a single toothbrush.
What I am talking about is the fact that we learned yesterday that the real unemployment number in Detroit may be nearly half of the working age population - forty-five percent, to be precise.
There are no jobs in the private sector available for these folks today. What would be wrong with a federal program to put a large number of them to work for the public good?
What if we were to create something like an American Infrastructure Corps, to fix roads and the bridges and tear down dangerous and unsightly abandoned buildings?
What would be wrong with paying some of them to prepare tracts of abandoned land for urban agriculture?
Almost certainly, we could vastly improve our state’s physical condition and give these folks a better life with new meaning for a tiny fraction of what we spent to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq.
We’re spending hundreds of billions to prop up mismanaged corporations and to bail out Wall Street. Why not a little money for the battered and shattered Main Streets of our state and nation?
Naturally, we couldn’t call it socialism. Incidentally, we sometimes pretend we no longer have taboos in our society, mainly because we can discuss sex on television in great detail.
And it’s certainly true that you couldn’t do that fifty years ago. However, back then you could freely discuss different economic systems and ideas, including capitalism, socialism, even communism. If you took it as a given that we needed what used to be called a “mixed economy,“ you could debate the proportions.
How large and vibrant should the public sector be? Today, you’ll find it far less taboo to bring up sex in conversation than to talk about what somebody might call - gasp - socialism.
Today, thanks to thirty years of what I’d call silliness founded on the charm of Ronald Reagan, far too many of us have come to believe that all government spending is evil.
That, is, of course, with the exception of the trillions spent to maintain a vast military apparatus. Nobody wants to admit this either, but -- collectively speaking -- the United States Armed Forces are the world’s largest and most successful socialist enterprise.
During the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration built post offices and schools and created classic guides to our nation’s states and rivers, along with some fine works of art.
Nobody today thinks a completely collective economy is the answer. Yet the so-called free and unregulated market doesn’t seem to get the job done either. Michigan has a lot of problems these days.
And the bottom line is that we are all in this together. Clearly, we would all be better off if everyone was better off.
So let’s park our ideological taboos in the garage, and come up with some rational policies to make that happen.

Recent Comments