Socialized Costs

"Privatize the profits and socialize the losses."

This has been oft repeated during our recently-extinguished minor economic slowdown; you know, the recession that's been in our rear view mirror for the past fourteen months. Every time we think of the Goldman Sachs bailout or that which was bestowed upon General Motors, this phrase comes to mind.

I think, however, the better phrase would be "privatize the profits and socialize the costs." This is the way we've been doing things for the past few decades, where we've discretely discounted the future for the sake of short-term economic benefits.


I'll offer up examples where we actively socialize costs:

• The assignment of cheap labor to manufacture things in foreign nations whose environmental laws are less onerous. We socialize the costs of 8,350 mile shipping routes as we leave trails of oceanic, atmospheric and localized pollution in their wake.
• We allow suburban sprawl developers to reap profits while increased traffic and stupendous energy requirements are then placed on the shoulders of those who move there (to the "cheap" subdivisions).
• Target and Kohls can freely utilize the taxpayer's funding of miles of roadways to keep their warehouses on wheels rolling, selling cheap imported shit while passing the costs of traffic and road maintenance to the taxpayer instead of the user through higher diesel taxes.
• Sarah Palin splatters how Joe the Plumber thinks universal health care "sounds like socialism," yet the socialized costs of taking care of millions of uninsured by the healthcare industry still occurs.
• Bank of America's credit card division eliminates hundreds of human call center employees who can easily route calls for customers and installs computerized call routing, laying the "costs" of frustration and failed routing onto their customers.
• WalMart sets up operations on cheap land on the suburban fringe and destroys the middle class economy of small towns while we go along for the ride because of the "greater good" of saving five dollars on an imported stapler.
• The "cost" of cheap Chinese merchandise manifests itself in broken staplers every two years instead of twelve, causing us to shitcan them sooner, causing more frustration than what would have otherwise occured, adding the costs of diesel machinery to dispose of this stuff in local (and sometimes distant) landfills.
• Our "richest nation in the world" is an amazing panorama of ruined cities with broken institutions and demoralized populations surrounded by Big Box Meccas and decaying suburban rings...don't tell me that's not a "cost."
• Access to liberal and cheap supplies of diesel to allow Home Depot to move imported "housal unit improvement" merchandise from Asia to Albany is fostered through multiple foreign wars and the supporting of "unfriendly" regimes who sit atop 60% of all remaining oil.

This has been the way we've discounted our future...all to save a few dollars off the cost of a (now chiefly plastic) stapler. I wonder why so many of us bitch about the perceived "socialism" of a black president while conveniently ignoring the the ongoing socialized costs of business activities.

I wonder why we've been so complicit in the hosing we've gotten. It's been slowing working for several generations now. Was this sorta thing inevitable?