Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston Page B

universal that this third revolutionary wave rolling across the
globe is so powerful that nothing can stop it or even alter its course. There are, Blinder says, no cures, just palliatives. He suggests
spending more on job retraining, changing the education system for the future, making health care available to all whether they
have a job or not, and improved protections for pensions. Training and education and health care must be financed, whether by
government or private means. In a future in which tens of millions of high-paying jobs migrate offshore this raises an obvious
question—who would pay for these economic Band-Aids?
    To just assert that globalization will
have its way with our future and that a jobs revolution is unstoppable and uncontrollable is both irresponsible and dangerous. Yet
that is just what many of our political leaders and their economic advisers say on television every day. On the television programs
that tout stocks, anyone who questions free trade is ridiculed by the hosts, who brook no serious discussion.
    Overall, the net result of our government policies is that America is selling its wealth to China and other
countries, not unlike the widow of a profligate husband who must part with the art, the furniture, and eventually the house to
sustain herself. At the end of 2006, the United States was spending more for what it bought overseas than it sold, resulting in a
record trade deficit of $902 billion. That meant that for every dollar generated by the American economy about seven cents was
leaving the country, worsening America’s status as the world’s most indebted nation. Just a generation ago we were the world’s
leading creditor nation.
    As Warren Buffett calculates it, America is selling close to 2 percent of
its wealth each year to sustain our appetite for imported oil and cheap manufactured goods, many of them mere trinkets. Once we
get down to selling the house, how will the children and the grandchildren live? And what of generations yet
unborn?
    Revolutions, unchecked, bring violent change that destroys the good and the
innocent. Karl Polanyi, one of the most influential anthropologists, wrote in his 1944 book The Great
Transformation that the rise of fascism in the thirties and World War II resulted from masses of scared people, with
no sense of control over their economic destiny, acting in ways small and great from economic fear and the panic it induced. In
America today, out among the people who are not major campaign donors, there is economic anxiety aplenty, a rational response
to the loss of so many well-paying jobs to China and other countries with more workers than work. It would not take much to turn
that anxiety into irrational fear. Yet our leaders have little time to truly understand the concerns of people who do not pay to be
heard with their campaign contributions, so we get policies skewed toward the interests of the rich and powerful.
    The whole premise of America is that we are free to choose our destiny. It is only through constant critical
evaluation of our circumstances that we can identify new problems and address them. We can react to the forces of change and
shape them, or at least adapt to them, so that we maximize the benefit and minimize the harm. Or we can just let a narrow but
powerful segment of our society continue to have the rules written to suit their desires. Better to elect leaders with the judgment to
explore what can be done than to risk an economic disaster that brings forth leaders who will exploit our misfortune and, as
happened in the thirties, scare us into relinquishing our liberty.
    Of course, life is not all work.
But even when it comes to play, the culture of taking from the many to enrich the few infects our society, as we will see
next.

Chapter 5
SEIZING THE
COMMONS
    T HE DOOR TO
APARTMENT 24 C OPENS ON A HALLWAY KITCHEN
THAT flows into a central room crowded with furniture as plain as it is