ON THE HOME FRONT

The myth of hard times

W hen I called you the other day at home in Lexington, you w ere
sitting in the dark, because the pow er had gone out.

I have a feeling w e’re going to be seeing more and more of that
sort of thing. T here simply hasn’t been much investment in
infrastructure. It’s part of the drive for short-term profit: you let
everything else go.
A lot of people are aw are of it. We had a plumber in the other
day, and he told us he had just bought himself a generator because he
expects the pow er to be going off regularly.
Outsourcing is another aspect of it—it saves corporations’
money today, but it destroys the potential w ork force. In the
universities, they’re hiring part-time junior faculty, w ho turn over
fast. In research, there’s a lot of pressure to do short-term, applied
w ork, not the kind of basic, theoretical studies that w ere done in the
1950s and that laid the basis for the economy of today. T he long-
term effects of this are pretty obvious.

W hat do you think of this notion of scarcity—not enough jobs, not
enough money, not enough opportunity?

Take a w alk through any big city. Do you see anything that needs
improvement?
T here are huge amounts of w ork to be done, and lots of idle
hands. People w ould be delighted to do the w ork, but the economic
system is such a catastrophe it can’t put them to w ork.
T he country’s aw ash in capital. Corporations have so much
money they don’t know w hat to do w ith it—it’s coming out of their
ears. T here’s no scarcity of funds—these aren’t “lean and mean”
times. T hat’s just a fraud.

In 1996, President Clinton signed something called the Personal