How Fast Would You Drive?

At the risk of being tedious, I am basically going to repeat myself tonight. Maybe the fix we and Wall Street and our mortgages and IRAs need goes deeper than just liquid credit and restored confidence. Maybe there’s a moral component here that needs to be addressed.
Since the late 1800s most Americans have worked from the moral assumption that people are basically good. For many it has been an article of faith that, given a choice between good and evil, most people would choose the good.
As I have said before, this goes to the bottom of many assumptions our schools and social institutions are built upon. Against all logic and all experience, most educators hold that students are fundamentally good – and that what they need from schools and social agencies is empowerment to arrive at the good choices they would naturally select.
That assumption lies at the root of Reaganomics. Just get the government off the back of business (deregulation) and, unfettered, business and businessmen will invariably choose the good. (As they did at Enron or when they made up these packages of subprime mortgages.)
Paulson urged this. Greenspan was an advocate. So were treasury secretary after treasury secretary – and presidents from both parties over the past 30 years. The wonderful folks who brought you the Moral Majority seem to have believed this. Next only to godliness was their belief in deregulation.
Regulation is really nothing more than acceptance of the reality of how humans will behave – as three year olds and as adults – if left unsupervised and unchecked. When teaching college history, I often raised the issue of human behavior.
Most students reflexively thought that people will indeed do the right thing when given the opportunity to make the choice. I would respond with one question. If you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all police officers had been pulled off the road, how many of you would drive home tonight at anything like the legal speed limit?
I’d wait. The smiles would begin to come. Point made.
Over the last thirty years, we’ve pulled the cops off Wall Street and out of the corporate board rooms. Nobody running an IRA, a company, or a bank was driving at anything like a legal – and safe – speed limit. Such a crash we’ve had.
“Disregard of risk” they call reckless driving in banks and stock markets. But it’s really the same thing as “reckless driving” on the public streets. The only thing that keeps more drivers from doing it on our roads is the presence of the police. (Ever notice how traffic slows down when a cop car comes into view? Many drivers drop even below the legal speed limit.)
Want to stop reckless driving on Wall Street (or “disregard of risk”)? Obvious – put the cops back. (Incidentally schools that advocate empowerment and the essential goodness of kids – how come so many of them have an armed policeman on duty all day long?)
(NO! It’s not to protect the school from outside shooters. They are primarily there to protect faculty and students from students who act with “disregard of risk”. Believe me, I’ve seen officers called upon in that capacity many times! I was once one of four people it took – two of them policemen – to hold down one irate and violent student.)
The people who put this country together – and fought a revolution against England – were under no illusions about human nature. The Constitution is not written in accordance with any belief that citizens will choose the good if only empowered.
Under the Federal Constitution, citizens are granted relatively few rights – only those that they can be expected to exercise safely under supervision (regulation, if you will). No American citizen has ever been allowed to vote for a President or a Supreme Court justice. It took a century and a quarter before we were permitted to vote for senators.
This was deliberate. The founding fathers were all too aware of what most people, left unregulated, would choose. (They knew what they would probably choose.) And they created a system of governance that has endured for centuries – while other governments more concerned with “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” have collapsed over and over.
Maybe before we cobble together some fixes for our banks and businesses, we need to take a second look at our underlying assumptions. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect little atoms of self-interest to choose everybody else’s good.
After all, how fast would you drive?