Long before the beginning of the end of the dream-sequence that was the Celtic Tiger, there were many concerned voices within Ireland bemoaning an apparent erosion of traditional values and cultural fabric within the Irish community.
While house prices in Dalkey sky-rocketed, and sales of boats/porsches/rolexes went through the roof, the youth in the working class communities of Dublin and Limerick flocked to organised crime and the drug trade. The root cause of this social polarisation could, arguably, be explained by the near extinction of any belief in the concept of civic duty. The Republic of Ireland is a young state and the immature nature of its socio-economic policy has undoubtedly contributed to our sudden fall from grace. A lotto-winner-esque selfish devotion to personal wealth can never build a legacy. Ironically, inspiring potential future competition is the only way the business glitterati can ensure their existence is sustained. Once the working class strata of society are convinced of their destiny to continue serving a social elite convinced of their perpetually privileged status, the economy fundamentally reaches its full capacity, and the only way is down.
Last June, I was lucky enough to visit the astonishingly beautiful hills and volcanoes of Rwanda. The first thing I noticed was the gushing pride that each and every Rwandan took in the appearance of the streets and countryside they lived in. There was not one scrap of litter or rubbish in sight. The patch of roadside in front of each clay and wattle hut that was home to the average Rwandan family is impeccably manicured and peppered with pretty flowerbeds. This remarkable civic pride is reinforced by innovative social policy that makes it law for every single Rwandan to spend the last Saturday morning of every month, picking up rubbish, cleaning-up public areas, weeding flowerbeds and re-painting walls in public areas. It is only one day a month but, the amazing sense of collective civic pride that it has engendered in a country that only 14 years ago was literally tearing itself apart, is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
I'm not sure if the world is capable of a seismic shift in its value structure that makes us all want to volunteer for the local soup kitchen. Unfortunately, the man in the street will always be predominately motivated by the filthy lucre. If ever we manage to get out of this mess, tax legislation will have to be structured towards financially motivating the 'haves' to give back to the communities that spawned them. Only then are those on the margins of society motivated to participate rather than opt-out and add to the ills of society. That's when an economic boom becomes a fundamental shift in a country's fortunes.
Capitalism does require winners and losers, 'haves' and 'have-nots' but, it is only sustainable if the passage from one end to the other of these polar strata is actually possible by following the rules of the game. If a young person from a working class community doesn't believe that they can rise to the ranks of the affluent upper-classes, no matter how hard they work, then society merely resembles a feudal state rather than a free market economy. Without this basic freedom to even influence one's destiny, bust will always inevitably follow boom.
The Chicago Boys, who masterminded General Pinochet's dismantling of Allende's socialist economy, had many admirers, including Margaret Thatcher who was then inspired to take on Arthur Skargill, and break the unions in the UK. The capitalist free-market ideology that they implanted into 1970's Chilean society was applauded widely in the western world and even resulted in one of the Boys, Robert Coase, winning the Nobel prize for economics. The subsequent discovery of the repressive nature of Pinochet's administration has since led to Coase's admission that the Chilean experiment was a failure. His conclusion was that a free-market economy cannot succeed without the free will of its people.
Socio-economic policy that guarantees status quo for the 'haves' and 'have-nots' can never create a truly free population that fundamentally believes in its individual ability to influence its own destiny. Until every member of society has the true choice to make something of themselves if they are prepared to work hard enough, there will always be an excuse for people to opt out. The downfall of every empire has its origins in the dissatisfaction of the masses with its share of the pie and, the paranoid ringfencing of the pie by the ruling classes. Thing is, if everyone could work their way towards a bigger slice, they would also make the pie bigger.
WNgC
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