Rick Santelli versus George Bailey

"All I want is freedom and community."

Francis Carney was a great professor, and I took every course that he taught. I have quoted him here, but that quotation was not his opinion. He himself quoted a former student, but only to mock him. To Professor Carney, freedom and community were opposites, and they were mutually exclusive. You could have one or the other, he told us, but you couldn’t have both.

1. Rick Santelli: apostle of every-man-for-himself.

CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli famously condemned the economic bailout and the Obama administration. He asked people around him if they wanted their tax dollars to pay for their neighbors’ mortgages. His point of view, his choice between freedom and community, was as clear as natural gas.

Santelli is an apostle of every-man-for-himself. His rant was the spark from which the Tea Party exploded.

Here is that rant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQQfzXQ6UjA&NR=1

2. George Baily and community.

But Santelli’s point of view is not the only light in the American political sky. There is an anti-Santelli. His name is George Bailey.

George Bailey was Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. At a climactic point in the movie, Bailey’s savings & loan was threatened. His depositors - his shareholders - panicked and thought they’d loose all of their money. They crowded Bailey’s saving & loan and demand to withdraw their savings. In a Santelli-like assertion of every-man-for-himself, they sought to exercise their freedom.

George Bailey talked them down. He talked them down by explaining that they were invested in each other. He explained that their money wasn’t sitting in a safe: it funded the mortgages of their friends and neighbors. (That’s why George Bailey’s speech is so easy to contrast to Rick Santelli’s.) Bailey persuade his shareholders to take small portions of their savings instead of trying to draw out all they had, and he won for his savings & loan a reprieve from the forces that want to crush it, represented by the odious Mr. Potter.

Community scores.

Here’s a piece of George Bailey’s speech to his shareholders. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Er69b4HMl8 Here’s a longer version, giving the context of the first clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu2uJWSZkck&feature=related

3. American politics and striking the balance.

I have argued before that politics in America is largely a calibration of the balance between freedom and community. http://justsayinghere.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-we-think-when-we-love-health-care.html

Fundamentally, I think that’s correct.

In 2008, America favored the balance suggested in the candidacy of Barack Obama over what John McCain offered. In 2010, the balance shifted away from community toward every-man-for-himself.

2012 is upon us. Campaigning has started. Once again, candidates take their place on a continuum between freedom and community. To me, all Republican candidates (except perhaps John Huntsman) represent an extreme argument against community and for every-man-for-himself. They want to arrest regulations. They want to return us to the days when corporations regulated themselves. Ron Paul goes so far as to call for the end of the Department of Homeland Security: let airline companies themselves take responsibility for their own security and the safety of their passengers.

Which is pretty much what we had on September 10, 2001.

4. Santelli and the world of tomorrow.

To foretell the future that the Republican candidates would propel us toward is as easy as looking at the past that was.

For example, at the outset of the 20^th Century, the federal government started to regulate food production because of scandals in the meat-packing industry. Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle provoked public outrage. The Jungle led to not-so-surprise inspections by Teddy Roosevelt’s administration that revealed the wretched, filthy, disgusting conditions of meat-packing plants. The only one of Upton Sinclair’s claims that inspectors could not find evidence to support was the claim of a man falling into a vat and being sold as lard.

Regulation of the food industry is community, and I don’t want to return to the freedom that existed before Upton Sinclair’s exposure of that industry’s filthy practices.

Those filthy practices arose from the pursuit of profit. That same pursuit led to the implosion Enron. And it led to companies like Goldman Sachs selling investments to their customers that were so bad that Goldman Sachs, for itself, made financial bets that those investments would stink and sink. Which they did. Goldman Sach’s customers were financially flayed, and Goldman Sachs made huge profits - profits from selling terrible investments to their customers, and profits by betting that those investments were the financial equivalent of bad meat.

That happens when a balance is struck too much toward freedom and too far from community.

5. Striking a balance.

I disagree with Professor Carney. I don’t think that freedom and community are mutually exclusive. But I think that it takes hard work to find the ideal balance between them. I’m suspicious of those that think that community - represented by regulation - has no role in a free society.

To see the future with the extreme embrace of freedom and the extreme rejection of community, you need only look at the past. And the past is the domain of poison, poverty, and Thalidomide babies without arms or legs.

And that sucks.