Land of the Free. David A. Bedford

the second proposed that wealthy corporation CEOs were the principal job creators, and should accordingly have their taxes reduced drastically so that they can create more jobs and thus create wealth. The third was the above-mentioned axiom that taxing business is bad. As for the second and third tenets, since the 1980s taxes on the wealthiest have been drastically reduced, with the result that the wealthiest 1% of Americans now have the majority of the wealth of the country in their hands. The promised creation of jobs and wealth for ordinary Americans never materialized. On the contrary, the buying power of most families has fallen rapidly behind the rate of inflation and so, as a country, we are considerably poorer than we were in the 1950s and 60s. The proliferation of consumer goods masked what was happening for most people, who were buying by using credit cards. The credit card companies allowed everyone to make minimum payments indefinitely, but the minimum the companies set did not cover the interest accumulated in the month in question. This meant the less financially able cardholders fell further behind with each payment. Some people paid in full each month and others paid up what they owed over the course of a number of months. The majority of people, however, were using the cards to make up for their lack of purchasing power from their earnings. If they could not pay more than the minimum or chose not to, they fell into a painful financial trap. The card companies were aware of all this, of course. At the time of this writing the economy is having an unusually sluggish recovery from the great recession of 2008 largely in part because people are cutting up their credit cards or restricting their use significantly. Customers are spending much more within their means and that means a reduced economy. I hear on the radio well-informed commentators wonder aloud if this reduction is permanent.

      The first idea mentioned above is rarely questioned. I teach at a premier private university, where I regularly hear my colleagues say, in effect, that we have to keep students happy because they are our clients. After all, they or their parents are paying their college expenses. This concept is a misapplication of the buyer-seller relationship to an institution of higher learning, which is most emphatically not a business. Businesses make money, or at least they do so regularly or cease to exist. A university, however, only spends money and that is as it should be.

      My wife and I were missionaries with a large protestant denomination in Brazil for four years. For over a century, the various boards of the denomination, including the foreign mission board, had been headed up by executive secretaries, who administered with a view to making certain the contributions given by church members were used wisely and that the policies of the various boards were adhered to. The title “executive secretary” reflected the acknowledgment that we were not a business and that missions were not a money-making endeavor. The foreign mission board was highly decentralized, with the missions (consisting of all the board’s missionaries in each given country) being entrusted with the proper use of the money. The administrators back at headquarters in the US understood that the missionaries living and working on the field knew the needs far better than they did. Business people were in awe about what the denomination was accomplishing with its money and how well everything was accounted for.

      Around the time we went to Brazil, the newly installed executive secretary contracted business consultants, by whose recommendation and approval by the foreign missions board of trustees, had his title changed to president and reorganized the administration, centralizing decision making, as in a corporation. One could not have expected any other recommendation from business consultants, who had no missionary experience and could not be expected to understand the reasons for how the board had functioned up to that time. This would have never happened if our culture did not blindly assume that the way to organize any entity is to make it work like a business.

      The outcome was a major turnaround of responsibilities. Mandates came down from headquarters as to what missionaries had to prioritize and eventually ended administration by the missions in each country. At the time of this writing, the board is having to downsize the number of missionaries, in part because many missionaries are not happy with how things have evolved and in part because the apparently permanent economic downturn in the US has significantly reduced the funds available for salaries and operations. In other words, the acceptance of business criteria in an endeavor that is in no way a business, combined with the deleterious economic effect of slashing taxes on the wealthiest, has greatly weakened what was once an enviably efficient and effective mission effort.

      Our uncritical support of business also affects our politics, and therefore our democracy.

      The US Supreme Court would never have ruled that the Constitution requires that corporations be treated as people absent this cultural assumption. The protections of the Bill of Rights are clearly meant for individual American citizens. Only a distortion of meaning could make these rights apply to corporations, and that distortion comes from the cultural theme that tells us that business is the supreme good.

      As I write, one of the candidates being nominated for president in one of the parties is, by his own account, a wealthy businessman. He has been known to fail at much of what he has taken on, requiring him to file for bankruptcy more than once. However, millions of people support him uncritically. One woman was quoted in the New York Times as follows: “We’ve had an administration the last eight years of someone that never ever hired anybody and was responsible for a payroll, who filled ninety percent of his cabinet with academia, teachers, and professors. I want a guy that’s run a business. I don’t care if it’s a bulldozer and he’s cleared lots for 20 years.”

      There is so much wrong with the above “reasoning” that it’s difficult to know where to start. First, the assertions concerning the administration she refers to have no basis in fact. Second, the claim that you need to have experience of hiring and running a payroll as a necessary qualification for president has nothing in the constitution or in US history to back it up. As a matter of fact, our form of government is not a business nor is its purpose to make money for anyone. Most people, when told that the country needs to cut back spending and stay within its means just as in a business, being culturally conditioned to accept business as the model for everything, accept it readily. This is a perfect illustration of how our faith in “the business of America is business” molds our thought processes and decisions.

      There are other effects of this cultural theme that few people recognize. If you drive through west Texas, my native state, you will approach towns preceded by a long string of farm equipment and car dealerships, places that sell seed and fertilizer, mechanic shops, all housed in zinc-sided buildings, all showing their wares in the open, and none displaying any beauty at all. The towns themselves are dominated by grain elevators, gas stations, and places to eat that apparently have not changed since the 1940s. Some have a chain restaurant that looks like every other restaurant in the chain anywhere else in the country. There is no sense of the esthetic anywhere and nothing visual to show character or identity. No wonder the young people never return to these places after going to college. All of this is what Texas calls being business friendly: low taxes (or none) and minimal (or no) regulation. All the powers have to do in Texas to shoot any proposal down is to say it isn’t business friendly. The connection of business and government going back as far as the Virginia and Massachusetts Bay Colonies readily explains this lack of logical thinking.

      Our house is built on a slab laid directly onto the clayey soil. It has no foundation. In summer the soil expands and in winter it contracts, resulting in cracks in the walls and driveway. The same is true for all the other houses built in the 1970s and later. The only people to gain from that sort of flimsy construction are the developers who built the houses on the cheap and the companies who are glad to put a foundation under your house, for an extortionate fee, of course. In all this, the interests of the business people were attended to, but nothing else was taken into account: not what the shifting clay would mean to homeowners, not the historical experience of house building, not the lack of safety afforded the residents during tornadoes.

      The Riachuelo is a partially channelized small river which forms the southern boundary of Buenos Aires. The city’s most concentrated industrial activity is conducted along its banks, on the city proper side and on the suburb side to the south. There are numerous tanneries among the factories, so it is easy to account for the foul stench, the ugly greenish bubbling surface of the water, and the bloated dead fish drifting aimlessly on it to the River Plate and then on to the sea. Over the last sixty or more years