Wealth should be founded on hard work

We have become a nation of gamblers. As work became less lucrative and more insecure, and risk was shifted to individuals, people decided that gambling made sense. People of limited means went to the 7-Eleven and bought lottery tickets. People in the middle went to Las Vegas or Indian reservations to play the slots and blackjack. Speculating in real estate expanded from the Donald Trumps to ordinary Americans who bet that the value of their houses would keep rising. They even bought houses to “flip” or rent.

People with a bit more money bet that the stock market would keep going up over the long term, and that dips would be minor. The big dogs in finance bet on stocks and commodities. At one point, 27 barrels of oil were being traded on the commodities market for every one barrel being produced. Wall Street began to look suspiciously like a Ponzi scheme or a casino. 

A lot of CEOs became the financial equivalent of slum lords. Slum lords buy property and wring as much money out of it as possible without spending anything to keep it up. When deferred maintenance catches up with the buildings and they can no longer produce rent, the slum lord sells them. Some CEOs had no interest in the long-term health of the corporations they headed. They used them to make money for themselves in huge salaries and bonuses, and when companies became too weak to reliably produce profits, they abandoned them for the next job. 

There was an idea abroad in the land that we could become an “ownership society.” That sounded good until the things we owned declined dramatically in value, triggering a downturn in the economy that threatened that other source of our wealth, our jobs.

The United States needs to re-create an economy that rewards work more than it rewards speculation. The one thing all of us “own” is our time and labor. That should be the source of our wealth, not our ability to read the tea leaves and predict which piece of land or commodities or even stocks will increase in value. Women and men should be able to provide themselves with a decent, if not lavish, life by dent of their own industry, not the accuracy of their crystal ball. People cannot build lives for themselves when there are wild gyrations in their incomes, gaps in their medical care and massive risks in doing the simplest things like buying a place to live.

Banks don’t want to lend money because they don’t have any sense that they can predict what the buyer’s income will be. They also don’t know what property is worth. They have gone from assuming property will increase in value and shifting their risk to others by selling off mortgages to being frozen in fear of lending to anyone. 

Individuals are also freezing spending even when they have money because, like lenders, they don’t believe they can predict their incomes or assets. People who fear the future turn into hoarders, not savers. Saving is an act of confidence in the future; it’s planning. Hoarding is a vote of no confidence in the future; it is shutting down, withdrawing from activity out of fear. Both banks and individuals are hoarding right now.

For all of this to change, the country needs its citizens to once again know that if they work hard and educate themselves, their contributions will be needed and financially rewarded. They need to know that they can earn their way in the world, that their country is not a casino where you need Lady Luck to produce enough wealth to live a decent life. The ownership that needs to count most is the expertise and hard work of our people. 

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.