By my own admission I am probably the worst business woman in the world. I never worked for money but for love of the career. I tried taking a few business classes and felt utterly bored and repulsed. I suppose I was lucky to be married to a man who seems to actually enjoy reading articles from The Economist and listening to experts in the world of business. He freed me from any need to pore over figures or study the economic situation from one moment to the next. While he devotes much of his day to understanding what is happening in that realm I am free to write and interact with the few students that I now have. That is where my interest lies and he makes it possible for me to do that without being encumbered  by business decisions. 

In spite of my revulsion of the world of business I am fully aware of its importance in everyone’s daily life. I am fascinated in particular with the real movers and shakers of the world, not so much out of an interest in emulating them, but from the standpoint of understanding the psychology of what drives them to want so much more than what they actually need. In that spirit I am constantly watching documentaries and reading stories and editorials about the movers and shakers of the past and present. I admit to benefitting from many of the things that they made possible while also wondering why they are all too often driven to cross lines of decency to keep adding to their bottom line.

I recently viewed a series called Titans. It began in the Gilded Age that developed just after the Civil War and continued into the dawn of the twentieth century. The recurring theme of the program was that power seems to all too often corrupt even the most well intentioned people. Becoming wealthy is not enough for some individuals. They seem to be lured more by power than just money. Once they get on a roll there never seems to be a point at which they feel comfortable just living on what they have accumulated. They become consumed by a kind of greed that overtakes their sense of honor. They have to keep winning and all too often in that vein they eventually cross lines of legitimacy that ultimately ruin them and hurt others as well. 

I remember my grandfather talking about his life at the end of the nineteenth century when he was a young man just starting his journey as an adult. He talked about economic panics that left ordinary citizens scraping to stay housed and fed. He watched rich people taking advantage of poor souls who were ignorant of the actual value of things. It bothered him intensely to witness wealth being hoarded while seeing families in such dire straits that they were starving. He was very much a proponent of government guard rails that insure that every citizen will have enough to live decently. He understood that for many different reasons there would always be people who needed extra help and he applauded the idea of making sure that they will have what they need. 

In my grandfather’s youth the rich were only rarely controlled in their determination to do whatever it took to keep feeding money into their coffers. It was Theodore Roosevelt who first became a trust buster by setting rules that made the playing field of commerce just a bit more fair. Sadly the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression was proof that the so called Titans of wall street were still out of control. It would take Franklin Roosevelt to design programs like Social Security and proportional taxation among many other efforts to control greed and distribute national wealth.

Starting in the nineteen eighties some of the safeguards that had led to more and more opportunities for the common citizen once again came under attack. Taxes were greatly reduced in favor of the wealthiest Americans The theory was that if they kept more of their wealth they would distribute it with jobs and perhaps even philanthropy. Sadly that has not always happened. Today there are hundreds of billionaires in the United States who find ways of avoiding taxes of any kind. In addition Congress eventually gave them the ability to send millions of dollars to political candidates who are willing to legislate in their favor. It’s beginning to look more and more like the times of my grandfather’s youth when the richest citizens were calling all the shots and many ordinary citizens are struggling. 

As a teacher of economically disadvantaged students I heard a recurring story over and over again. These children lived in tiny apartments or rented houses sometimes without even having a bed to sleep in at night. Many of them spoke of parents who worked multiple jobs just to keep the family housed and fed. They spoke of mothers and fathers who left before dawn in the morning and did not return home until late at night so exhausted that they could barely walk. The oldest children became the surrogate parents of their younger siblings, feeding and bathing them before putting them to bed. Only then did they have time to do their own homework and studying. They too were perennially exhausted. 

We have many Americans who believe that creating programs like universal healthcare are forms of communism, but I would argue that such safety nets are  simply the decent thing to do. All too often the poor never get out of the rut in which they toil while wealthy people buy second homes and travel all over the world. We have a reluctance to ask them to give a little more to insure that the suffering among us will have the baseline assurance of having their most basic needs met. Why would we all be so greedy that we would not want everyone who is able to help the most desperate among us to climb higher on the ladder of success? It’s idealist, I know, but it would be wonderful if our nation became a titan of fairness just by asking all who can to give just a bit more. We did it before. We can do it again.