In the back of my mind, I had been thinking since the early 90s that capitalism shouldn't work. Back when Borders was in its heyday of IPOs and stock splitting, when everything was blue skies and candy rainbows, I realized that the key to success in terms of American corporations was to grow continually, never slowing (and even increasing if you can manage it), doing more and more to keep the stockholders happy so they'll keep investing. It was apparent to me even then that this was an unsustainable pattern, but many people smarter than me about these sorts of things seemed fine with it. (Seth Meyers once had a joke that rang especially true with me: "When everyone's making money, no one examines the system because they're too busy saying 'WHEEE!'")
So what did Borders do to keep said investors happy? Expand internationally, opened more and more stores, spreading themselves thinner and thinner until an inevitable downturn in the market caused them not to be able to scale back fast enough, and the whole thing came crashing down. I think it really was a larger example of how most people live their lives: exist on credit under the assumption of never-ending income.
In any event, this was one case out of many. The crash has put America in a position of there suddenly being more able-bodied people than there are jobs. That doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon. Companies that downsize just learn to make do with less people -- even if Borders had completely bounced back, do you think they would have ballooned their staff back to its former levels? Of course not.
At the same time, there are more and more complaints about the "millennial generation", who are (to hear it told) are lazy, shiftless and spoiled -- which, you may remember, is how EVERY GENERATION SINCE THE BABY BOOMERS has been described, particularly by the generation that came before.
But here's the thing -- and let me talk about this by way of my own experience -- I recently went through a period of almost two years of unemployment. Now, during that time, I suppose I could have taken a minimum-wage job somewhere, but I put in the time and effort and looked for something in my field of expertise. And that wasn't just a matter of pride or vanity, but that to do so would have been a step down from the unemployment benefits that I was getting. Early on I did the math and realized that if I took a job that paid less than $13.50 with healthcare deductions (almost twice the current minimum wage), I would be actually bringing home less money and food for my family to live on.
This is why you'll never hear me complaining about benefits programs -- these "entitlements" you often hear Republicans complaining that the rest of us think we deserve. Thanks to these programs, my family was "entitled" to survive with comparatively minimal change -- we kept our home, ate three meals a day, and maintained our Internet connection so I could keep looking for jobs.
It's really a testament how great our country is that I could afford to take the time to look for the right job, rather than have to take the first thing I could get. And it's exactly this fact that is being brought against the millennials. They're not lazy and shiftless -- at least not any more so than the generations before them -- they're trying to find the best way to navigate in a business system that is actively working against them being able to get a decently-paying job. And they're being ridiculed for it.
The truth is, more members of today's society than ever before are starting at a baseline that was the end goal for most of human history... having a sanitary place to live, enough food to eat, and something to wear. Each generation seems to start off a little better off than the one before. And yet, we expect them to work just as hard, if not harder, to make more money to get more stuff.
Up until now, America has run on the continued accumulation of wealth. But as the cost of living decreases -- and rest assured that it is, a person with a full-time job can afford technology that would seem like a king's black magic to a person with a full-time job twenty years ago -- we should start asking ourselves what wealth gets us, exactly. And whether a person's value to society is equal to the amount of money they can pump back into it.
So can we really blame young folks if they can get by without dedicating themselves to a career that they really don't want -- and less and less really need? It seems as though we're moving toward a civilization where more people, instead of what they *have* to do, can do what they believe they *should* do, That's something I can definitely get behind.
The biggest problem America has had up until now is the power structure that has been in place. We can't change to alternative energy, too many jobs depend on the auto and gasoline industries! It's cheaper for the military to continue to produce tanks and planes than to close the plants! Well, we're closer now than ever before to the perfect time and place to make these kinds of fundamental changes.
Here's my proposal: privatize our infrastructure (and from here on out, bear in mind that I'm no student of finance or business, so it's entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm talking about.) As I understand it, private companies like Halliburton made billions of dollars providing ancillary supplies for the military during the wars of the last decade. I don't see a reason why similar companies can't take over supplying what we might need to build a smart power grid, or maintain our highways and replace aging bridges, or construct wind farms/solar panel fields/flood levees/nuclear plants so that we can reduce our carbon emissions and set an example for the rest of the world. Hell, with a healthy, competitive infrastructure-renovation industry, we could even branch out internationally and work toward getting the whole world up to code.
But it takes a change of mindset to put something this big into production. It needs people who aren't beholden to the way America has been run up until now. It takes someone with a new mindset, someone who hasn't already bought into the go-to-school-then-go-to-work-until-you-retire paradigm. Someone who, I don't know, might be seen as lazy and shiftless, but is really being afforded the opportunity to find new ways to work within and outside the current system.
See what I'm getting at here?
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