RSS Feed MenuMonday’s CNN.com column draws some American lessons from Canada and Argentina.
Latin America is a marvelous place to be rich. A decade ago, I lived in Peru for a month on an assignment. My hosts assigned me an apartment tended by a housekeeper and butler.
Every morning, the butler silently appeared at breakfast time bearing a toaster, which he rested atop a magnificent sideboard in the great dining room overlooking the Pacific Ocean. With a pair of tongs, he dropped bread into the appliance, depressed the switch, and then stood motionless in place as he waited for the slices to pop. He then presented them to me with a slight bow. I felt like a character out of “The Remains of the Day.”
Yet this luxury can never be secure, and often ends very badly for the luxuriating — either because a revolution eventually comes or, more often, because the strongmen who promise to avert the revolution prove almost as rapacious and merciless as the revolutionaries.
A little more social equality would buy a lot more social peace. Making the toast yourself will help you to keep the sideboard.
cheves222 // Jan 4, 2010 at 10:27 pm
Right on all counts. Of course, the bit about the left is true. On the right, we tend to gloss over higher concentrations of economic power too quickly. I’d rather have JP Morgan ruling the US economy than Uncle Sam, but I’d prefer neither. Markets stabilize because they equalize. When too much (as opposed to “a lot,” of course) gets centered in a few people’s hands, what the hell good is it to even have a market anyhow.
Still, America is not South American. The percentage of wealth concentrated into the hands of a few in places like Argentina would make even Rush Limbaugh choke on his Dominican cigar. America is uncomfortably top-heavy, but it ain’t the same.
In the end, the left still needs to learn that economies function on kept promises as much as “people working.” Let’s hope Barack, et al, learn this quickly.