I Didn't Get the Memo
In a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, "Overselling Capitalism,"
University of Maryland Professor Benjamin Barber wrote of the "crisis"
in the capitalist mindset, where the "'Protestant ethos' of hard work
and deferred gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of
easy credit and impulsive consumption that puts democracy and the
market system at risk."
Wow, I must not have gotten the memo. Here I have been plugging negative numbers into my 1040 for three or four years in an attempt to build a business and some future wealth, and it turns out that deferred gratification is out of style. (TJIC also did not get the memo)
Here is a big reality check for professor Barber: The fact that a few mortgage companies got overly generous in extending mortgage credit does not mean that the work ethic and entrepreneurship is dead. In fact, they are virtually unrelated topics. If the price of something is reduced, more is going to be consumed. Suppliers of credit reduced the price of credit, too far as it turned out to make a profit, and more was consumed. This does not represent so tragic change in the human makeup, it is just supply and demand at work, like normal, and some bad business judgement.
In fact, I can't get over the class-based condescension that seems to fill every nook and cranny of the commentary on the mortgage bubble bursting. When in the late 1990's, rich VC's provided too much money too cheaply to yuppies running Internet companies, I don't remember anyone lamenting a shift in human motivation or a failure of capitalism. But when banks provided too much capital too cheaply to lower income people for home mortgages, suddenly all those lower-income people are representative of the failure of capitalism and the work ethic.
