Let Justice Roll

Drive the W.Va. economy: Do you want to take the high road or the low road?

By Rick Wilson
Sunday Gazette-Mail, 7/8/07

While visiting a large city recently, I overheard something that struck me as unintentionally funny.

An adult cautioned children playing outside by saying, “Look up and down before you cross the street.”

Later, I was told that kids there thought of streets as going up and down.

Today, as we contemplate West Virginia’s future in a global economy, those words don’t seem like such bad advice after all.

Two distinct approaches are open to us: a low road and a high road.

A low road approach advocates reducing public investment in schools, higher education, health care, research and infrastructure. It wants to slash wages and labor standards so that we can “compete” with low-wage countries by becoming more like them. In other words, a race to the bottom.

The high road approach wants to lift West Virginia to a knowledge economy. This calls for investments in education and infrastructure and preserving and improving a quality of life that would attract talent and capital from all over the world and retain and develop our native talent and resources.

To see two examples of these contrasting approaches, compare the recent book Unleashing Capitalism by Russ Sobel with Create West Virginia, a project of A Vision Shared.

Let’s start with the first.

Unleashing Capitalism advocates abolishing the minimum wage, not raising it. It proposes weakening unions — the gateway to the middle class for millions of Americans — by right-to-work (for less) legislation, privatization and resisting efforts to raise or maintain labor standards by anything other than “market” forces.

It opposes prevailing wage standards for public construction projects. Instead these (assuming they’re not all privatized) should be built by the cheapest available labor from anywhere it can be found.

Instead of improving our public education system, it proposes undermining it by a voucher system. (All this is in Chapter 10.)

Instead of stronger mine and workplace safety laws, it opposes regulation on principle and prefers this to be handled by “the market.”

This is from Chapter 4: “Mandated safety regulations often create unintended consequences that work against the original intent of the legislation. Even when these regulations are effective, the improved safety conditions result in lower money wages for workers. Are workers really better off being safer but making less income?”

You be the judge. I’d say it depends on whether they’re dead or alive.

Presumably, a Darwinian approach is preferred in which miners over time leave unsafe companies and gravitate to companies with better voluntary safety policies — the ones who survive anyway. Call it “unnatural selection.” When applied to food supply, this approach has been dubbed “E. coli conservatism” by writer Rick Perlstein.

And we are asked to accept all this as gospel, as totally apolitical and objective “science.” Anyone who disagrees is a “Marxist.” In reality, it’s an ideologically libertarian worldview that conservative writer Robert Locke has called “the Marxism of the Right.”

In a 2005 article in The American Conservative, Locke argued that “If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism to function.”

By contrast, the Create West Virginia approach also wants to make capitalism work and calls for big changes, but “Change is not an end in itself, but a means to advance larger, progressive goals: higher incomes, new economic freedom, greater dignity and more autonomy for working people and stronger communities.”

Building a knowledge economy requires both entrepreneurship and public investments. It means having the environment, tolerance and quality of life that will attract talented people from all over. It means raising our levels of educational attainment and improving access to education and training so that we can nurture and retain the talent of our citizens. It means building our physical and technological infrastructure.

Which offers the most promise?

The 2005 book How We Compete: What Companies around the World Are Doing to Make It in Today’s Global Economy by Suzanne Berger summarizes the findings of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center study of over 500 international companies:

“Contrary to the widely held belief of many managers, we conclude that solutions that depend on driving down costs by reducing wages and social benefits — in advanced countries or in emerging economies — are always dead ends. ...

“Strategies based on exploiting low-wage labor end up in competitive jungles, where victories are vanishingly thin and each day brings a new competitor. ... As low-end firms that compete on price move from one overcrowded segment of the market to the next, there is virtually no chance of gaining any durable advantage. The activities that succeed over time are, in contrast, those that build on continuous learning and innovation.”

In a 2006 interview, Berger said that “Globalization can continue to produce great benefits for our society — on the condition that we strengthen the infrastructure of research and education.” She also calls for programs that ensure that losing a job “does not mean losing a family’s access to basic necessities, like health care, provision in old age, and education.”

So which way will it be, the low road or the high road?

This might be the time to look up and down before we cross the street.

Wilson is director of the West Virginia Economic Justice Project and publishes The Goat Rope, a public affairs blog: www.goatrope.blogspot.com.