Americans can't really decide who or what is to blame for the current mess we're in, much less how to get out of it. Are we plunging into a dark age of socialism and regulation, or righting the wrongs of capitalist greed? What you hear depends on whether you're tuned into O'Reilly or Olbermann. But punditry is beside the point; the real question is whether or not the sacrifices we must make will help our country.
Barack Obama's election has been hailed as a new day in American politics; look up from your food tray and you'll see a generation that has been galvanized by him. We have had Sept. 11, two wars, bubbles burst; and now we have chosen a young, brilliant senator from Illinois to lead us out of the mess we're in. President-elect Obama has taken pages out of FDR's playbook and plans to embark on a nearly unprecedented level of federal spending and government-directed investment. These times demand a critical eye; we elected Obama, and now we have to be prepared for the consequences.
Look at the example of a recent transportation dispute in Chicago. Canadian National Railway Co. purchased a suburban rail line from U.S. Steel to ease congestion in the freight train bottleneck in Chicago. As freight trains, carrying everything from grain commodities to Asian technology imports, compete for limited track, inefficiency and congestion rules the day. Easing that congestion makes sense, especially when you look at the environmental benefits and cost reductions of transporting freight by train. After all, a freight train can move a ton of freight over 400 miles on a single gallon of fuel. However, as Canadian National was about to complete the deal, they ran into a firestorm of public uproar. Wealthy suburbs launched a publicity campaign and hired lawyers to block the potential surge of rail traffic.
Cue an ambitious ad campaign sponsored by the suburban warriors, including commercials urgently depicting flashing ambulances stopped at a busy railroad crossing. A voice argues that every minute your defibrillation is delayed, your chances of survival go down by 10 percent. This all seems to imply that emergency medicine should be delayed for low-income communities instead, who are overrun with train traffic and don't have the publicists or lawyers to fight it. In the end, however, our federal transportation board approved the rail line and overrode the suburbanites.
As most positive change and progress goes, someone had to be inconvenienced.
I'm sure Gutenberg forced boredom and some unemployment on the monk industry, but that's the nature of strong, bottom-up innovation. In our race for an economic cure, we need to ensure that our solutions target our failures, not our successes.
So what happens when progress is more than a freight train occasionally rumbling through your neighborhood? And what happens when the government pulls the strings? As part of the Big Three's bailout, Washington is now writing these companies' business plans, demanding that they invest in building small, electric cars for a questionable market. Some see it as a victory for sustainability and "greening" the gas-guzzler-laden auto industry. Other "victories" are in the works to forcefully phase out the coal industry in favor of greener alternatives. The coal industry and its thousands of employees would object, especially when you consider how clean our coal industry is compared to China's.
Government intervention is picking winners and losers in our economy; and lately, the winners have had substantial lobbying budgets. No matter what you think of Obama, you have to eventually consider the government's ever-expanding powers and responsibilities. Is anything and everything justified in the name of a greater American good? And should our government be the one deciding?
I do not believe government is inherently evil, nor do I wish to contribute to the "Obama is a socialist" mantra that was all too pervasive in the lead-up to November. What I do want to do is challenge this mostly liberal campus to exercise diligence in the years ahead. We'll all be asked to make sacrifices to see this country change for the better in the years ahead. Let's ensure that our liberty, our entrepreneurial spirit and our greatest economic strengths aren't on the altar.
