If, as a nation, you are already at the leading edge of knowledge, culture and industry, and if the right conditions come together and give you a sudden upward lift that is unprecedented in scope and intensity, you will most likely experience a renaissance that will prompt you to score spectacular advances in all fields of human development. For centuries after that, you will create and build signposts that will forever bear testimony to your accomplishments and speak of your contribution to world Civilization.
Your growth up to the time of the renaissance will have been a natural organic growth, and the construct of your culture will have been a solid one as a result. The renaissance itself will have happened as a consequence of the advances made up to the time that it appeared; and when it takes hold and solidifies, its effect will be felt throughout the culture of which it will soon become an integral part. In due course the renaissance will help the culture to crystallize into a construct that will come to be recognized as a full fledged civilization. In fact, this has been the historical record of the European nations in the cycle that began in the Middle Ages and culminated with the Renaissance that bloomed to become Western Civilization, a force that took on the dominant civilizations of the time and overwhelmed them.
If, on the other hand, time has passed you by and you find yourself to be underdeveloped compared to the other nations despite what you may have accomplished in the past, you have much work to do to rise again and take your place under the sun. For one thing, you can provoke a long march toward an artificial renaissance aimed at catching up with those ahead of you. And to succeed in this, you will have to implement a plan that will allow you to make advances in every field of human endeavor and thus rise to a great height one step at a time.
Indeed, if you were underdeveloped by the time the Twentieth Century had come around, it is likely that you have provoked an artificial renaissance already. But let it be known that the growth you may have simulated was by no means an organic one. Unless you succeeded in closely mimicking the organic growth of the developed nations, your own development will have been less than perfect and would have created mismatches that resonated throughout the culture and spilled over to the rest of the world. In fact, this has been the case with most of the developing nations in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and South America where they experienced bouts of fits and starts as they ironed out their mismatches.
Despite all of that, however, the worldwide situation remained manageable till such time that the unintended consequence appeared out of nowhere to remind us that we cannot predict the march of history before things happen. And what happened was that the advanced nations, known collectively as the West, woke up one day to realize that by using a quirk of the economic system created by them, the developing nations were putting them out of business one trade at a time. And this is the situation in which we find ourselves today, a situation that has implications serious enough to cry out for attention. The predicament in which we are is real because the world has been flattened by modern technology and because everyone’s interest has become intertwined with everyone else’s interest. To paraphrase the metaphors and to mix them, we find ourselves in the same boat ready to sail together or drown separately.
And this interdependence is what exploded the economic crisis of the year 2008; an event that some people had predicted but no one had imagined would be this severe and this widespread. Luckily, the central bankers in the West had learned the lesson of eight decades previous to that and they succeeded in stabilizing their economies. They pulled away from the precipice that would have taken them down a second great depression while the other economies of the world managed to come back to life in record time.
So then, where do we go from here? The short answer is that the world economy needs to be overhauled and that everyone needs to get on with their moment of renaissance. The developing nations know what they must do and they are doing it. If anything, they tend to go overboard doing the right thing and they should be told politely but firmly that they need to restrain themselves when challenging the Western economies which are still fragile. As for the latter, the European part of those economies had begun a program of sustained growth before the crisis; and they may have to modify it in order to continue muddling through till the developing nations develop enough to stop throwing cheap goods at them.
The hard core problem that remains is the United States of America. This is a nation that has existed in a perpetual cycle of renaissance due to its history. First, the Natives were slaughtered and their wealth looted; a lucrative business by any measure except the moral one. Then, slave labor and capital were brought to America to fuel the agrarian economy. Then, immigration caused by famine elsewhere in the world brought skilled labor and new capital to build the infrastructure of the modern industrial economy. Then the great wars of Europe brought in more capital along with the entrepreneurs, scientists and thinkers of all kind that catapulted the country to the status of a superpower, rivaled for a period by the Soviet Union then by no one.
It was this history that sustained America’s uninterrupted growth throughout the centuries. However, the growth was a useful development in many ways but useless and dangerous in a few other ways; and this is what planted the seeds for America’s current woes. Indeed, no longer is there a native population to slaughter and to loot. What is left of these people is an impoverished group sitting on a land that hides very little in mineral resources. Also, no longer are slaves brought into the country to pick cotton or to man the sweat shops where the cotton and the other fibers are made into garments. And no longer are there skilled laborers or highly educated individuals desperate to go to America by the boat load as it used to be. If anything, there is a reverse brain drain which takes people back to their countries of origin where they see better opportunities to raise a family.
And while the population of those who do things in America is diminishing, the population of those who do little or nothing is increasing. These are the youngsters who live and loiter in the inner cities; those who have little or no education, no skill, no job history and no hope of ever joining the regular economy. Aside from this group, there are the people who already committed more than their share in the realm of crime. They sit in the jails of the nation looked after by the state at a very high cost to the taxpayers. It is therefore clear that America’s moment of renaissance will have to touch on all these areas simultaneously or there will be no renaissance in that country. And this would be a serious occurrence given that the rest of the world is moving toward a global arrangement where everyone will have a place under the sun.
What should America do?
It has been said that America’s political genius comes to the fore at election time because the people always choose the mix of candidates that suits the moment from among those who run for office. If this is true, then the election of Mr. Barack Obama as President must have had a purpose, and the message of the people must be that the biracial community organizer they have elected holds the key to America’s salvation.
If so, what this man should do for America is take the big risk and plunge into a multi-layered plan that will embrace renaissance in all its elements. The plan will have a long term objective requiring a mid term objective to be completed which, in turn, will require a short term objective to move forward. The work will proceed at all levels simultaneously and make visible progress on a weekly if not daily basis. It will be a massive project that will start immediately and take as much as a generation to complete. And it will be a project that the whole nation will be happy to rally around and be a part of.
The President will start the ball rolling with a prime time address to the nation in which he will make the following points:
1 - We shall build a society in which our wellbeing will no longer depend on the importation of geniuses, hard working or well motivated people from abroad to fuel our economy. Our own schools will produce such geniuses and our society will provide the reason to motivate them.
2 - We shall accomplish all this by repealing the government subsidies that build bridges to nowhere and factories that turn wholesome food into fuels that harm the environment and ruin the economy. We shall also refrain from getting involved in costly and deadly foreign adventures. And we shall use the money saved to implement the programs which will encourage the development of a local talent that can imagine a sustainable economy and can build it from scratch.
3 - Because the repeal of a subsidy always hurts the state and the district to which it was going, we will make sure that every state will gain as much as it loses. In fact, we shall ask the senators, the house representatives and the governor of every state to participate in the decisions that will determine how the old should be phased out and the new phase in.
4 - We shall continue to adhere to the principle of free trade with foreign nations, and to the principle of a minimum wage at home but we shall take another look at both so as to refine them and make them work better for everyone.
5 - With regard to free trade, we no longer subscribe to the winner-take-all quirk that some people worship as an economic philosophy. On the contrary, we consider it essential that every nation be given the right to protect certain sectors of its economy up to a negotiated level so as to safeguard national security or to maintain the cohesion of its people. We believe that the level ought to be 30% of the goods and services that the nation consumes in a given sector but this level is negotiable. We shall discuss these ideas with the rest of the world and see to it that they are adopted. And the good news is that this system will replace the practice of gaming the current set-up which everyone knows does not work and tries to get around.
6 - This done, we shall call on private enterprise to come up with concrete plans for every state of the union whereby the hard core unemployed among the young will be housed, educated, employed, supervised and paid the wage of an apprentice. This will be less than the minimum wage and will remain in effect until such time the candidate is ready to join the regular economy. These people will be making the cheap goods we now import from abroad such as textiles, leather goods, furniture, souvenirs, building material, toys, appliances, electronics and so on.
7 - Perhaps as many as ten million youngsters living in the inner cities will benefit from this plan. It will be a massive job to build the facilities that will house them, educate them and employ them; and it will be a massive job to recruit the professionals who will stand by them where they will be lodged, educated, trained and put to work.
8 - A similar program will be implemented in parallel so as to achieve the same result with the people who are incarcerated. These people will be paid a wage that ranges between the current prison pay and that of apprentice. Some of the money will be kept in trust so that when they leave jail, they will have money to start them in life. With this and with a basic education, a skill and a job history, they will be less prone to recidivate.
9 - Perhaps as many as two million people now incarcerated will benefit from the plan because it will steer them away from crime and shepherd them toward a wholesome life. And this too will be a massive undertaking to pull off.
10 - Both plans will begin immediately and may have to go on for a generation. They will stimulate the regular economy right away because private business will be called upon to realize them. Because the money to fund them will come from the elimination of the subsidies now wasted on useless projects, the material benefit to the economy will be enormous while the cost will be minimal. As for the moral benefit to society, it will be incalculable when you consider the effect that they will have on the current generation and future ones.
11 – In addition to that, the products that these people will be making will replace what we import from abroad, a fact that will help our balance of payment. And there is one more thing that should fire up your imagination. The labor force working in American manufacturing today barely reaches the 20 million mark; and it is on the shoulders of these people that our 14 trillion dollar economy rests. If we add 10 million more skilled and semi-skilled workers to this force, think of what the economy will look like.
12 - With these two plans, we launch our renaissance. The Chinese whose population is 4 times the size of ours have managed to pull 500 million people out of backwardness and push them into modernity. We should be able to do the same with 10 or 12 million of our people. And the result to the nation will be the complete transformation of our society. This was the mandate given to us by the last election as I understand it, and I urge every one of you to find a way to participate in this long term national project.