The American Ideal
Let’s Talk About the Caring Economic System Caring Citizens Want
A common question among progressives I know, ordinary Americans in both the Democratic and Republican party, is, “What should we be talking about?” Effective language is needed NOW to describe the American caring economic system that ethical businesses inhabit, when everything is working well. Think of it as the American Ideal.
Let’s Use Different Language NOW!
George Lakoff, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant, wrote in that Introduction, “Reframing is social change.” Caring Citizens’ Congresses, member organizations of the Empathy Surplus Project, are communities of practice that ESP charters to facilitate the education of caring citizens in how to apply the work of Lakoff to REFRAME our world to build an empathy surplus.
Those communities of practice may create policy directions that they want to promote that they have developed in conjunction with ESP, and if, there is not already a policy direction that covers their concern. (See Our Mission) The following policy direction was developed by the 1st Caring Citizens’ Congress of Wilmington, Ohio.
“Ethical businesses inhabit caring economies created by wealth creators, who live in commonwealths.”
It was created after [a] Empathy Surplus Project was accepted as a UN Global Compact participant, and [b] its delegates read George Lakoff and Elizabeth Wehling’s The Little Blue Book. This particular article focuses on chapter 19, “The Economy and the Public.”
AMERICAN SOCIAL CONTRACT
This policy direction is in line with the American social contract of working as hard as possible over a lifetime, whatever your job or your pay, is a lifetime’s worth of contribution to a caring society. Also, being a caring citizen, a reliable community member, and a dependable family member are also contributions to a caring society. Caring citizenship and caring family membership has little or no correlation with wages but are tremendously important for a caring society. Political freedom, private life, and private business are not possible without a strong, caring society.
CONTEXT — THE ACTORS OF A CARING ECONOMY ARE “FREE PEOPLE” — not the middle class
No where in the US Declaration of Independence did the framers talk about a “class system.” The actors in their narrative of what they wanted were “free people.”
In 1776, when the 55 elected representatives of the 13 colonies of Great Britain, signed the US Declaration of Independence, they were defending the human rights of a FREE PEOPLE. They were not defending a “middle class.”
Free people despise tyrants. And the representatives of the free people of the 13 colonies referred to their monarch in the following way:
“A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
Thus, with anti-monarch sentiment running high, 21 of the 55 elected representatives referred to their home colony as commonwealths to make a point, i.e. wealth inequality is unacceptable to a free people.
Among the more well known representatives from those three original commonwealths were Samuel Adams and John Hancock of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania. (Two of the charter members of the First Caring Citizens’ Congress of Wilmington, Ohio, are direct descendants of John Hart of New Jersey.)
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
Empathy is the soul of democracy. Consider.
We encourage the use of the words “people” and “wealth creators” to be used interchangeably. Wealth creators are caring citizens, who live, work, and play in commonwealths.
Whether in family, work, or public government, wealth creators govern themselves with the core values of empathy, responsibility to self and others, and the strength to protect and empower one another. Employees are employer’s private wealth creators. Customers are business men and women’s private wealth creators. Everyone is the commonwealth’s wealth creators, which every business and family needs to create the American Ideal infrastructure that makes a decent life possible.
The framers of early America used the word “people” in our US Declaration of Independence ten times. Today, to borrow a phrase from Lincoln, as we consider “a new birth of freedom” in the 21st century, let us consider our freedom documents, and use the phrases they would have said, if they had used the term “wealth creators” instead of people:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for united wealth creators to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is very long, according to historian Danielle Allen, and author of Our Declaration. In the original document, there was no period after the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” making this sentence 111 words long. That LONG sentence put the power to create the government that people / wealth creators want and need squarely into the hands of people / wealth creators.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Wealth Creators to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
Six uses of the word “people” are found in the litany of “repeated injuries and usurpations.”
“He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of wealth creators, unless those wealth creators would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
“He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the wealth creators.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
“He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the Wealth Creators at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our wealth creators and eat out their substance.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our wealth creators.”
FREE PEOPLE ARE WEALTH CREATORS AND LIVE IN COMMONWEALTHS
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good Wealth Creators of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States . . .”
Wealth creators can’t be free without the freedom to create a commonwealth from which private wealth and freedom are possible. Governments and markets don’t grow wild in nature to be discovered. They are created, by people, by the wealth creators, who live in the commonwealth.
THEREFORE WE SUGGEST THE USE OF THE FOLLOWING LANGUAGE TO CREATE A NEW COMMON SENSE
FREE PEOPLE with HUMAN RIGHTS
- Wealth creators must be free from fear and want
- Caring Citizens / wealth creators have each others’ backs
- Wealth creators live in the commonwealth, which makes private wealth possible
FREE FAMILIES
- “Natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the state.” — Article 16, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Nurturant parent families are gender neutral
- Govern with empathy and responsibility, both personal and social, i.e. your family and other families.
- Parents are strong enough to care for themselves and their children and teach them right from wrong, empathy, and responsibility, both personal and social.
FREE GOVERNMENTS
Effective public government protects and empowers individuals and their:
- Family government of care
- Caring society organizational government of care
- Ethical business government of care
PUBLIC REVENUE VS TAXES
- Revenue — Money used for the Public, to create the commonwealth. In the American Ideal, taxes and fees are like dues paid to live, work, and play to create the necessary revenue to invest in and maintain the commonwealth. “Revenues” focuses on the use of the money, not on who’s paying it or who gets it. It avoids the negative connotations.
- Revenue depletion — What has happened in America because corrupt millionaires and billionaires have not paid their fair share.
- Revenue neglect — What has caused our current national deficit.
AMERICAN IDEAL VS AMERICAN DREAM
Dr. Lakoff suggests we use the term American Ideal versus American Dream because “ideal” refers to morality and excellence. The American Dream is a money frame and leaves out progressive values and the answer to the question why you should care about anyone else. It doesn’t say what kind of a society you want to live in.
CIVIC TASKS VS GOVERNMENT SERVICES
Since what are called government services are realizations of the American Ideal of public protections and public empowerments, Dr. Lakoff suggests we call them civic tasks carried out by task forces. They are tasks, because they are public necessities.
Task — A task — like enabling healthcare as the human right it is according to internationally recognized human rights documents — is something that needs to be done (it’s not wasteful), that comes with a responsibility (it’s not impersonal), that takes work and skill, that is part of a larger enterprise and set of responsibilities, and that can’t be done by just anybody.
Civic — This term indicates that these tasks are part of public life, not just a private transaction.
PUBLIC TASK FORCE
- Not simply people sitting in an office doing their individual jobs.
- It is optimally organized to carry out the complex tasks of the Public as an integrated group.
- Included in this reframing government agencies to public task forces are not just empathy and responsibility, but also the ethic of excellence.
- Members have a commitment and a joint responsibility to do their job as well as possible.
ECONOMIC STIMULUS
When referring to economic stimulus that public investment and maintenance create we should refer to them as:
- Public investment versus government spending
- Public maintenance costs versus government spending
DEFICIT CREATION POLICIES
National budgets are nothing like family budgets: As a nation, we owe money mainly to ourselves, can print money, and can borrow it cheaply. The morality, ideas, and language of extreme conservatism, perpetrated on wealth creators by the elected accomplices of corrupt corporations, mostly multi-national, have not focused on the American Ideal, but rather on anti-public protections, and un-ethical subsidies akin to theft of the common wealth. Therefore, these policies should be called deficit creation policies, which are created through revenue neglect, as well as, undertaxing corrupt corporations.
ETHICAL BUSINESS RESPECTS, PROTECTS, AND PROMOTES HUMAN RIGHTS
The latest insights of the brain tell us you have to repeat the ideas you want. That’s what the UN is doing. The United Nations Economic and Social Council created the Global Compact in 2000 in an effort to encourage businesses with ten employees or more to align their operations around ten principles in relation to human rights, decent work and leisure, clean air and water, and anti-corruption of government. The 19 year exercise has served to begin to re-define the concept of the “ethical business” around those principles.
In contrast, an un-ethical business is a corrupt business.
Ethical businesses proponents use human rights language to replace the language of safety nets, benefits, and entitlements. Here’s how:
- Deferred pay are payments for work done in the form of health care, pensions, severance pay, and so on. These are not goodwill benefits. Wealth creators earn deferred pay. For example, health care provided through one’s work should be called
- Worker-earned health care — Many workers stay on the job for such pay, which is a form of
- Worker loyal — Worker loyalty benefits business and increases profit because regularly recruiting and training new workers would be costly.
- Public deferred pay — Wealth creators, when they perform legal work, pay into Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. These are forms of deferred pay. When wealth creators work they contribute to a caring society and a caring economy through these public deferred pay.
CORRUPT CORPORATIONS DISMANTLE WORKFORCES
When corporations view employees as resources, as in “human resource departments,” the natural move is to pay as little as possible for that resource. This is called workforce dismantling. There are five kind of corrupt corporate policies to achieve workforce dismantling. These corrupt corporate policies are
- Union busting so wealth creators have less bargaining power
- Using technology to replace wealth creators
- Organizing work to require the least skill possible
- Laying off older wealth creators with higher pay and replace them with younger wealth creators at lower pay
- Replacing permanent jobs with outsourcing and part-time work
PROGRESSIVE MARKETS CREATE CARING ECONOMIES
Markets, like freedom, are not free. Progressives should avoid the corrupt corporate term of “free markets” and replace it with progressive market. The idea of the progressive market affirms the idea that capitalism as it is practiced now, lacks empathy and responsibility to others, and can be improved.
Caring citizens are often attacked as socialist and engaging in class warfare, or at best only focusing on the middle class versus all Americans.
The progressive market term fits into the idea, spelled out by in 1945 by 50 Rotarians — members of the premier and largest business and professional organization in the world at the time — that values like empathy and responsibility to others, that are foundational for ideas like peace, human rights, human dignity, equality, justice, and the rule of law — are directly related to progressive markets and caring economies.
The fourth bullet point of the UN Charter’s preamble, which Rotarians helped to create, reads
We the Peoples of the United Nations determined . . . to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom . . .
We advise caring citizens to embrace the word social and talk about the long-standing and traditional American social contract for all Americans, mentioned at the beginning of this article, and embrace the term progressive markets . . . to make social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom . . .
- Progressive markets proponents recognize the market’s dependence on the Public.
- Progressive markets proponents recognize its ethical obligation toward maintaining the Public and its infrastructure.
- Progressive markets proponents understand the need for public protections against harm from corrupt corporations.
- Progressive markets proponents understand the need for fair taxation.
- Progressive markets proponents understand the human right to unions, decent work, and leisure.
- Progressive markets are long-term markets.
- Progressive markets proponents recognize that short-term greed stress caring economies.
- Progressive markets proponents recognize that short-term greed threatens family climate survival.
- Progressive markets proponents recognize that short-term greed harms wealth creators by dismantling their workforce.
- Progressive markets proponents recognize that wealth creators are corporate assets, not human resources. Assets go on the positive side of the balance sheet.
Chuck Watts is the founder and president of the Empathy Surplus Project (ESP) that is currently in its 10th year. ESP has an educational mission, which we invite readers to consider joining.
