[Angelo Matera 03/03 02:54 PM]As we’re moving on from consumerism, I’d like to make a pitch for policy. Last week a reader asked: What can be done to reduce the corrosive effects of the market? I propose a tax on short-term stock transactions.
This would reduce the obsession with quarterly financial results that leaves business managers little breathing room to manage for the long-term health of the ALL business stakeholders, and our culture, by “doing the right thing”—such as NOT issuing that pornographic gangsta rap video that would be a huge seller, or NOT choosing the advertising campaign that appeals to extreme selfishness, or NOT bringing a drug to market with too many outstanding questions about side-effects.
Short-term-ism has other bad effects. One of the silliest statements made by conservative pundits about Enron, Worldcom, and other corporate scandals was that it was just a matter of “bad apples.” No, the problem was a culture of easy money based on options-driven stock speculation during the Dot.com bubble. I was a consultant to several companies during this period, and witnessed many otherwise decent—even religious— people fall under the spell of a greedy, get-rich-quick mentality.
And have we forgotten the social example set by the internet mania? It was a full-scale cultural revolution, a revolt of the new against all things old, with arrogant, infantile goateed dot.com jocks out to overthrow the old, bricks-and-mortar, reality-based economy. It was business as performance art—economic Dadaism. And greed is what spawned it. Where were conservatives on this? Nowhere (or, like George Gilder, smack in the middle of it.)
A stock tax would keep “irrational exuberance” in check. If anyone thinks this is veiled Marxism, see the new book by John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, the #2 mutual fund company in the world—titled “The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.” He advocates the same thing: “Mutual fund companies, Bogle charges, care more about short-term results than long-term value…. He advances in all seriousness Warren Buffett's once-joking idea for a high tax on short-term trading gains…”
Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that nothing can be done about the “creative destruction” of Casino globalization. My concern about traditional conservatism is that an aversion to “the masses” can lead to an elitist, romantic isolation from fellow citizens, and from the human messiness of politics and policy. This why a very explicit Christian perspective is necessary.
