April 25, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
The self-made myth is one of the most cherished
foundation stones of the conservative theology. Nurtured by Horatio
Alger and generations of beloved boys' stories, It sits at the deep
black heart of their entire worldview, where it provides the essential
justification for a great many other common right-wing beliefs. It feeds
the accusation that government is evil because it only exists to
redistribute wealth from society's producers (self-made, of course) and
its parasites (who refuse to work). It justifies conservative rage
against progressives, who are seen as wanting to use government to
forcibly take away what belongs to the righteous wealthy. It's piously
invoked by hedge fund managers and oil billionaires, who think that
being required to reinvest any of their wealth back into the public
society that made it possible is "punishing success." It's the
foundational belief on which all of Ayn Rand's novels stand.
If you've heard it once from your Fox-watching
uncle, you've probably heard it a hundred times. "The government never
did anything for me, dammit," he grouses. "Everything I have, I earned.
Nobody ever handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I'm a self-made
man."
He's just plain wrong. Flat-out,
incontrovertibly, inarguably wrong. So profoundly wrong, in fact, that
we probably won't be able to change the national discourse on taxes,
infrastructure, education, government investment, technology policy,
transportation, welfare, or our future prospects as a country until we
can effectively convince the country of the monumental wrongness of this
one core point.
The Built-Together Realty
Brian Miller and Mike Lapham have written the book that lays out the basic arguments we can use to begin to set things right.
The Self-Made Myth: The Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed
is a clear, concise, easy-to-read-and-use summary that brings forward a
far more accurate argument about government's central role in creating
the conditions for economic prosperity and personal opportunity.
Miller, the executive director of
United For a Fair Economy,
and Lapham, a co-founder of UFE's Responsible Wealth project, argue
that the self-made myth absolves our economic leaders from doing
anything about inequality, frames fair wages as extortion from deserving
producers, and turns the social safety net into a moral hazard that can
only promote laziness and sloth. They argue that
progressives need to overwrite this fiction with the far more
supportable idea of the "built-together reality," which points up the
truth that nobody in America ever makes it alone. Every single private
fortune can be traced back to basic public investments that have, as
Warren Buffet argues in the book, created the most fertile soil on the
planet for entrepreneurs to succeed.
To their credit, Miller and Lapham don't ask us to take this point on
faith. Right out of the gate, they regale us with three tales of famous
"self-made" men -- Donald Trump, Ross Perot and the Koch brothers,
whose own stories put the lie to the myth. (This section alone is worth
the price of admission -- these guys
so did not make it on
their own!) Once those treasured right-wing exemplars are thoroughly
discredited, the middle of the book offers a welcome corrective:
interviews with 14 wealthy Americans -- including well-known names like
Warren Buffet, Ben Cohen, Abigail Disney, and Amy Domini, who are very
explicit about the ways in which government action laid the groundwork
for their success. Over and over, these people credit their wealth to:
* An excellent education received in public schools and universities. Jerry
Fiddler of Wind River Software (you're probably running his stuff in
your cell phone or car) went to the University of Chicago, and started
his computer career at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Bookseller
Thelma Kidd got her start at Texas Tech and the University of Michigan.
Warren Buffet went to the University of Pennsylvania and the University
of Nebraska as an undergrad. And beyond that: several interviewees paid
for their educations with federal Pell Grants and Stafford loans.
Over and over, the point gets made: public universities -- and the
good public schools that feed them, and the funding programs that put
them within financial reach -- have hatched millions of American
entrepreneurs who might not have been fledged without that opportunity
to get an education.
* The support of the Small Business Administration and other government agencies.
Ben Cohen notes that almost all the business training he and Jerry
Greenfield had came from the extension courses at the University of
Vermont and Penn State, and small brochures produced by the SBA. And as
they spun up, they also got an Urban Development Action Grant from the
federal government. Other interviewees started their businesses in
incubators or other quarters provided or arranged by their local city
governments.
* A strong regulatory environment that protected
their businesses from being undercut by competitors willing to cut
corners, and ensured that their manufacturing inputs are of consistently
high quality. Glynn Lloyd of Boston's City Fresh Foods points out that
nobody in the food business can get by without reliable sources of clean
water; and that the USDA inspection process is an important piece of
his quality control.
* Enforceable copyright and intellectual property laws that
enabled them to protect good ideas. Abigail Disney recalls that her
father, Roy Disney, and her Uncle Walt made and lost one great cartoon
character -- Oswald the Rabbit -- because they didn't have copyright
protection. They didn't repeat that mistake when Mickey Mouse was born
three years later, launching the Disney empire.
* A robust system of roads, ports, airports, and mass transit that
enabled them to reliably move their goods both within the US, and
around the world. Kim Jordan of New Belgium Brewing (the makers of Fat
Tire beer) points out that "Beer is heavy, and it needs to be
transported in vehicles. Certainly, the highway system has been
important to New Belgium Brewing." Lloyd also points out that Boston's
excellent public transit system enables him to draw on a far wider
employee base.
* The government's role in creating the Internet,
without which almost no modern company can function. Anirvan Chatterjee
built Bookfinder.com (now a subsidiary of Amazon.com), the world's
biggest online used-book marketplace, an achievement that wouldn't have
been remotely imaginable without DARPA, the establishment and
enforcement of common protocols, and significant congressional
investment in the 1980s to take the Internet commercial.
* The ability to issue public stock in a fair, reliable, regulated marketplace
-- a benefit that raised the value of several interviewees' companies
by about 30 percent overnight. Peter Barnes, founder of Working Assets,
spoke with concern about the loss of trust in this system over the past
decade. "The corporate scandals [Enron and Worldcom] caused people to
stop trusting the numbers that companies were reporting. Imagine how
much value is created by trust and the whole system that assures that
trust?"
Besides the government, most of those interviewed also locate their
companies in the context of a large community of customers they utterly
depend on for their success. "It takes a village to raise a business,"
says Nikhil Arora of Back to the Roots, a sustainable products company
that came about through partnerships and grants from UC Berkeley, Peet's
Coffee and other interested parties.
Others are quick to acknowledge the contributions of their employees,
without whom their companies wouldn't exist. When Gun Denhart and her
husband sold their company, children's clothier Hanna Andersson, in
2003, they distributed a healthy portion of the sale proceeds to their
employees, prorated on the basis of their length of service.
All businesses exist within a vast network of human connections --
customers, vendors, employees, investors, and the communities that
support their work. These stories make it clear: saying you did it all
yourself and therefore don't owe anybody anything is about as absurd
(and self-centered) as saying that you raised yourself from babyhood,
without any input from your parents, and therefore don't have any
further obligations to your family.
The Role of Luck and Timing
We all know wealth isn't just a matter of hard work, brains or
talent. Most of us probably know some hard-working, brilliant, or
extraordinarily talented people who aren't being rewarded at anything
close to their true value. So perhaps the most intriguing and useful
part of the book is a long discussion of the many other factors that go
into making someone wealthy -- factors that are blithely brushed off the
table whenever the self-made myth is invoked.
Rich conservatives have to downplay the role of luck. After all, if
we think they're just lucky, rather than exceptionally deserving of
exceptional wealth, we'll be a lot more justified in taxing their
fortunes. But luck -- the fortunate choice of parents, for example, or
landing the right job or industry at the right time -- plays a huge role
in any individual's success. Timing also matters: most of the great
fortunes of the 19th century were accumulated by men born during the
1830s, who were of an age to capitalize on the huge economic boom
created by the expansion of the railroads after the Civil War. Likewise,
the great tech fortunes almost all belong to people born between 1950
and 1955, who were well-positioned to create pioneering companies in the
tech boom of the late 1970s and 1980s. Such innovative times don't come
along very often; and being born when the stars lined up just so
doesn't make you more entitled. It just makes you luckier.
Because Americans in general like to think we're an equal society,
we're also quick to discount the importance of race, gender, appearance,
class, upbringing, and other essential forms of social capital that can
open doors for people who have it -- and close them on those who don't.
The self-made myth allows us to deflect our attention from these
critical factors, undermining our determination to level the playing
field for those who don't start life with a pocket fat with advantages.
What Changes?
The book winds up with specific policy prescriptions that can bring
the built-together reality back into sharper political and cultural
focus. The last section shows how abandoning the self-made myth for a
built-together reality creates fresh justification for a more
progressive income tax, the repeal of the capital gains exemption and
raising corporate and inheritance taxes. It also makes a far more
compelling philosophical backdrop against which progressives can argue
for increased investment in infrastructure, education, a fair minimum
wage, a strong social safety net, and better anti-discrimination laws.
But the most striking thing about the book -- implicit throughout,
but explicit nowhere -- was the alternative vision of capitalism it
offers. Throughout the book, Miller and Lapham seem to be making the
tacit case that businesses premised on the built-together reality are
simply more fair, more generous, more sustainable, and more humane.
While far from perfect (Disney's empire being one case in point), they
are, as a group, markedly more aware of the high costs of exploiting
their workers, their customers, the economy, or the environment. Owners
who believe themselves to be beholden to a community for their success
will tend to value and invest back into that community, and they seem to
be far more willing to realize when they've got enough and it's time to
start giving back.
The implication is clear: if we can interrupt American's long love
affair with the self-made myth, we will effectively pull the center tent
pole out from under the selfish assumptions that shelter most of the
excesses of corporate behavior that characterize our age. This isn't
just another point of contention between progressives and conservatives;
it's somewhere near the very center of the disconnect between our
worldviews.
The Self-Made Myth is an essential primer that
gives us the language and stories to begin talking about this
difference, and the tools to begin to bend that conversation in some new
and more hopeful directions.
Sara Robinson, MS, APF is a social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page. Follow her on
Twitter, or subscribe to AlterNet's
Vision newsletter for weekly updates.
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