Good letter this week:
Finally the words ?social contract? appears in your comments. As a person in their mid-60?s and taught that we are in this together, it drives me ?nuts? that we have lost an understanding of this contract within a democratic society. Because of this lost, as my friend Peter Senge points out, we are living in a world of fatalism (http://www.wobi.com/wbftv/peter-senge-breaking-cycle-fatalism?goback=.gde_2247134_member_140308310#)! Hope you find this of interest.
We no longer seem to have the capacity to see the forest but just our own tree. This ?what is in it for me and the heck with the rest of you? is why we are on the path to a non-sustainable future for our children. This lost of the idea of the ?social contract? has led us to this lack of understanding of the interconnectivness of all segments of our society. Your point about education is well taken. So the question is, who is government? Well Pogo, its us!
Ah, but the right-wingers will reject this emphatically.
They don?t get anything from government, is their argument ? or at least not as much as the moochers who loll about on the public dime. It?s wrong, of course ? point out that the 60-plus year-old Fox News crowd gets plenty in the way of Medicare and Social Security and other government benefits and the answer is, ?I paid for that.?
That?s been the conservative response to my bit last week ? sure businesses benefit from roads and public education and other public investments, but they pay taxes!
Yes ? yes they do. That?s the entire argument; they pay taxes, they get a return on that investment, and because of that return on investment, they didn?t do it all themselves; without that investment, it would be significantly harder, if not impossible, for that business to succeed.
Education?s the prime example. Business needs employees who can handle the work. Where do those skills come from? Education ? public schooling, perhaps a state university. And what happens if a business can?t find enough trained workers? That business can?t do business.
Why so little recognition of the value, indeed the indispensibilty, of this type of public investment?
It?s as if conservatives, when pressed, will acknowledge that businesses or individuals have benefited from public investment, but because everyone benefits from that it wipes the slate clean; and so successful entrepreneurs deserve 100 percent of the credit for their success because they?re only utilizing resources for which they?ve paid and which are available to everyone.
But that?s the point of public investment in the first place. To grease the skids; to create the conditions whereby private enterprise can be successful.
That?s what Obama, Elizabeth Warren and others are saying; public investment is necessary for private success; and as such there is a social contract, you pay your taxes and those taxes are leveraged for the public benefit, be it for you as an individual or for your business.
Again, it?s really not that difficult to understand. It?s just that some folks don?t want to.
A 1985 graduate of Manheim Township High School and a 1989 graduate of La Roche College in surburban Pittsburgh, Gil Smart began his journalism career with Gateway Publications in Pittsburgh, and came to the Sunday News in 1994. He was named Sunday News Assistant News Editor in 1996, and Associate Editor in 2006. His column "Smart Remarks" has appeared in the Sunday News since 1998.Source: http://lancasteronline.com/blogs/smartremarks/2012/08/07/investing-in-ourselves/
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