It excites me when someone else writes the essay I've been noodling--and does it much better!
What is the common good? I didn't realize that Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, had written a book titled The Common Good, and has recently been excerpting sections in his Substack column.
The common good binds us together in a world, a nation, a society, a state, a county, a community, and a family. We are of necessity interdependent in too many ways to describe. From earliest times, we have come together to support each other for survival, and ensuring the common good underpins the fundamentals of a thriving society.
As Reich explains in his introduction to the Substack series, "It is about what we owe one another as members of the same society."
Social cohesion and shared values have been under systematic attack for decades, and it’s not far-fetched to lay the real break at the feet of Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States. While Reagan didn’t originate the ideal of “autonomous, self-seeking, and self-absorbed individual[ism]” (Reich lays a good part of the blame on Ayn Rand), he did popularize and mainstream the denigration of government and exaltation of imagined self-sufficiency. I say “imagined” because the argument is most accurately along the lines of “benefits for me but not for thee.”
To some extent, the rewards we receive as common goods seem invisible because they’re (almost) universally accepted. Our paths diverge when we try to decide where government oversight and generosity stop and individualism begins. Is it “bureaucratic red tape” or general safety? Is it “government overreach” or legal protection? Is it “freedom of religion” or Christian supremacy? It’s no accident that the libertarian Koch machine has tried to push these ideas for decades, since their profitability depends on unregulated, unfettered capitalism.
The installment that struck me hard was titled Jack Welch & the End of Stakeholder Capitalism, chronicling the results of Welch's slash-and-burn tenure at General Electric in the 1980s. Hearkening back to Milton Friedman's premise that increasing shareholder value is the chief responsibility of business (i.e. "greed is good"), Welch made GE a top stock market performer by eliminating jobs and moving operations overseas for cheap labor.
How did that work out? Rebuilding America's manufacturing and employment base is a large preoccupation of the current administration and many politicians today. Restoring the prosperity of the middle class; strengthening unions; combatting climate change; bolstering public education and college affordability--these are in essence about restoring the common good that President John F. Kennedy extolled in his "Ask not what your country can do for you" inauguration speech.
The common good is also about public revenue, otherwise known as taxes. We pay taxes to support services that we can't or don't want to provide for ourselves as individuals: public education, roads, electricity, broadband, national defense, public health and safety, and on & on. In a broad sense, this speaks to our values, and the type of society we want to be part of.
I can’t say it strongly enough: these aren't squishy, feel-good concepts. This interdependence drives our nation's prosperity and growth, allowing us as a whole to accomplish more than we could as individuals. Without contributions to the common good, we would each have to invent the wheel.
In Arizona, we love our individual freedom and idealize the tough, lonesome cowboy--but being an American, and Arizonan, does come with strings. I for one am excited about restoring the common good as a value in our society and daily lives.