Have Faith

The President hath decreed that we, as a unified nation, will fix what’s wrong with our economy. I strongly agree with this. I have faith. But that faith is not based on any of the ample collection of strengths possessed by President Obama. I have faith in Nature. Not human nature. Just Nature.
Nature is the universe. Everything that is anywhere at all. The laws and forces of Nature are the same everywhere. Black holes, pulsars, dark matter, etc. all are governed by the same forces as toxic assets, vise tight credit, and Wall Street collapses. The force of Nature that is the source of my faith is called Evolution.
That word usually springs to mind Darwin, ape-men, and school board controversies. The Evolution that I will speak of covers so much more than the biological level that Darwin focused on. For example, Biological Evolution is the force of Nature that rewarded a decreasing tail size in the pre-human beings who forsook the trees and took to the grasslands so that we now only have a tailbone left. But Evolution also worked so that today when we are confronted by natural phenomena beyond our reckoning we experiment and theorize to build a better understanding of its ingredients rather than deifying the phenomenon into another Zeus or Apollo.
Evolution is the force that changes life forms that are able to pass Nature’s tests or eliminates them if they fail. Our economy works the same way. While there are any number of shortfalls in what’s going on in America right now, the single factor whose solution would have the greatest positive impact is the damming of the credit stream by banks. At the root of this damming is fear. At the root of fear is a lack of understanding and clarity. Banks just don’t know the full extent of the toxic assets on their own books and the books of their fellow banks. Since the health of any bank, and thus their lending potential, is a factor of their asset value, having the government infuse money into the mix will clarify somewhat whose assets are worth what and then loosen the credit strings. In theory.
But what if instead of lending more bank executives pay themselves bonuses. Well, the public outcry at such a diabolical display of crass audacity would cause these obnoxious executives to be ousted (and hopefully imprisoned) and replaced by a new management team that vows not to repeat the same tactic. This new team will have learned that they risk similar treatment if they engage in similar behavior. Their motives will be to toe the line, at least for the time being. But in this mix there is likely to be some replacements who actually believe in their moral responsibility. Search committees will be seeking candidates with high ethical fiber. The test that this economic crisis represents will influence the emergence of more ethical banking behavior. And it is the overwhelming force of the market, us, that will energize this because now we are paying closer attention to what the executives are doing. The watched pot may never boil but the watched thief will NOT steal.
The fix first, and the oversight next. That way the force of Nature that we are will continue to influence what form our economy will take. Until the next crisis arises and we get to stamp out that next chapter of evil expecting to fly under the radar.