A Speech By a Young, Up and Coming, Politician.
We are too fat in this country (except for the anorexics that are too skinny and all the others that are just right). We must be over eating or not eating the right foods or not exercising enough or it must be ‘something else’. It is probable that the ‘something else’ is that some people just don’t have enough self control. Somebody should do something about this.
We are in a recession because people borrowed so much money to spend on their homes, cars and other things in life that they could no longer keep up with their payments if anything ever went wrong. And we all know that something did go wrong. The banks failed in their job by lending too much money to too many people, that couldn’t really afford it, to buy their homes, cars and other things in life. Banks should have known better. People should have known better. Both businesses and people lack self control. Somebody should do something about this.
In our country we don’t save enough money, especially for our own retirement. We should encourage people to put more money into their IRA’s and pension plans to supplement what Social Security owes them. In our country we aren’t spending enough money on housing, or cars, or other things in life to keep their prices from falling and to keep the people that make those things employed. If we want to employ more people we should encourage lenders to loan people more money to buy the things that employees make. People should be able to borrow money for what they want and people should be able to pay it back too. We must encourage businesses and people to have enough self control to both save money and spend money at the same time. We can figure this out and we can do something about it.
We obviously need smarter people. We need more doctors, more and better teachers, more engineers, scientists, business managers, accountants and lawyers and bureaucrats to make sure that all businesses and their workers that produce the things we want in life produce the right things in the right way. It all hinges on education; teaching the right stuff to the right people so that they could be put into the right job doing what they are supposed to do for the betterment of our society and country. If more people would only think about ‘what they could do for their country’ instead of for themselves I am sure we would all be so much better off. If education wasn’t so expensive many of the problems we face I am sure could be solved. If we need more doctors and better teachers we should encourage them by trading some of the cost of their education for doing the job we need them to do. We can do that.
It is not so hard to figure things like this out. We just need people to change their behavior and do the right thing. If there is something that we want as a society, as a country, or as a people we just need to figure out how to organize ourselves to make it happen – it is called planning. If we need teachers, doctors, scientists or business managers we can educate people to do those jobs. We can take our ‘best and our brightest’ and place them in the positions they are best qualified for. With the right kind of incentives I am sure that we could encourage people do the right thing, to go where we need them to go, and to be how we want them to be. We can change the behavior of businesses and persons through the tax code by using targeted rebates and deductions. We can change people’s and business’s behavior through bureaucratic agencies like the EPA and OSHA and the FDIC by regulating how, what and where work can be done. In caring for our children we can teach our young, when their minds are most impressionable, a proper sense of duty, respect and care for society; we can teach them to eat right and to stay fit along with reading, riting and rithmatic.
Most people aren’t motivated inside themselves to eat right and exercise, or to stop smoking, or to ‘Just say no!’ to drugs. Most people can’t motivate themselves to save for retirement or spend the right amount of their money on a car or house that would be right for them. Most people aren’t educated in ways to know or care about what is best for them. We don’t have to get people to change their individual, internal, motivation for their bad behavior when we can use things in their external world such as tax policy, regulation and law to nudge them in the direction of eating what they should eat, to stop smoking, to save for retirement, and to spend their money on a good gas saving car or green house.
As we get better at doing our job of guiding people’s behavior toward better and healthier ways of living we will create a much better and healthier society. People will hardly have to think about why they do what they do if we do our job well. Working to change anybody’s individual mind in an attempt to convince them to willfully change their own behavior is a waste of energy when their behavior can be more subtelly transformed externally through the tax code, regulation and police enforcement of the law. Individuals being mindful of their own internal, personal, motivation will be unnecessary in the future as we become better leaders of our people. Speech itself will hardly be needed in a more perfect world where everybody plays their part in what should be done for the betterment of all society. People will no longer have to act on their own or risk anything as they will be perfectly free acting between the lines clearly spelled out for them.
Imagine the world we can build together all working together for the same things. We have the expertise. We have the technology. All we need is the will power – the self control.
Maury Garvey
8/10/2010
* This paper came about after reading Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is At Odds With Economics – And Why It Matters, by Peter A Ubel. This is my first reading of ‘Behavioral Economics’. ‘Behavioral Economics’ is practiced by the Obama administration. The world as described in this paper is the end result of the practice of this kind of economic policy. This kind of economics was practiced in Germany from 1933 to 1945. About that I am not kidding. The paper itself is satire, though, as satire I believe it is really happening. People that believe in using such means to engineer a society are in power and they believe that what they are doing is the right thing to do – supposedly for our own benefit. I wish I was wrong, but I think I’m not.
