Book: America: Imagine a World Without Her
Quotes of Book: America: Imagine a World
Recall that this is the first time that America truly had a "generation gap," a chasm between parents and children. In previous generations, children wanted to be like their parents. They wanted, as quickly as possible, to grow up and become adults. In the 1960s, however, children regarded themselves as morally superior to their parents, even while indulging in irresponsible behaviors like lawlessness and drug-taking that their parents had never even considered. In short order, the children became incomprehensible to their parents, not only in their music, but also in their values. And while the parents grew older, the children, in a sense, never grew up. They remained, as it were, perpetual adolescents. Now they are graying and grayed adolescents, a breed the world has never seen before. book-quoteObama's claims about teachers and CEOs gets to a broader puzzle about how a capitalist society assigns rewards. At first glance, it seems that there is no relationship between merit and reward. Athletes and entertainers, who provide services much less indispensable than teachers and doctors, earn vastly more than either of those two professions. Earlier I mentioned the example of the parking lot guy who parks all the cars and makes money for the resort, yet he gets a pittance of that money. From his point of view, there is no relationship between work and reward. He does the work, and "they" get the profits. This is pretty much how workers feel in a variety of occupations. They are the "makers" and their bosses are the "takers." In a truly fair and merit-based society, they should get more and the bosses should get less. These arguments are, whether their proponents recognize it or not, anchored in Karl Marx's notion of "surplus value." Marx is largely discredited today, because Communism proved a failure, and Marx's prophecies proved dead wrong. book-quoteSecond, America is drowning in debt. While China is the world's largest creditor nation, America is the world's largest debtor nation. At $17 trillion, the national debt is now bigger than the annual gross domestic product-in other words, it is bigger than the total sum of goods and services that America produces in a year. Nearly half of this debt has been accumulated during the Obama years, at the average rate of a trillion dollars a year. At this pace, Obama will more than double the deficit in two terms. Since a substantial portion of America's debt is owed to foreign countries, such as China and the Arab nations, debt produces a transfer of wealth away from America and toward the rest of the world. Today, instead of America owning the world, the world increasingly owns America. book-quote
