Over the centuries, the United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy. Americans work longer hours than any other people. We switch jobs more frequently, move more often, earn more and consume more.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Commercial Republic – NYTimes.com.

From that opening thought David Brooks spins off in a business centric version of the American Myth. In his version it was the abundance of the frontier that called out to the American myth of success for everyone who tried. It seems to me that when the history of the American people is studied realistically, most people didn’t leave their “home” areas unless they were leaving something behind. For some, it was debts they left behind. Others left whole families, kith and kin.

Studying the history of American business successes leads one to wonder at the love affair we have with the myth of the self made man. Very few of the real success stories in this country have a thread of the moralistic ideals we are led to believe underlie our very national psyche. America prides itself on the ideal that anyone can rise to the top. We calibrate the few examples we are given. Yet most Americans will not rise above the class level to which they were born.

And its not the idealistic who do win up the ladder. No, the majority who manage to pull themselves up the ladder of success, do so at the expense of those around them. They stretch the meaning of the law even if they meet the letter. They use every trick and loophole to get a jump up.

Is there any reason then to be surprised at the excesses of the business and political sector in the last decade. It was only with societal regulation, that the business sector had been kept from allowing greed to run rampant over basic society mandated morality. The deregulation of the past two decades, the consolidation of whole economic sectors into a very few corporate hands, the wholesale bribery of public officials via lobbying firms and the handouts of favors and campaign funds have led us to this economic crisis. It’s not an American crisis, even though we led the way, it’s a worldwide crisis.

We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended. The public culture is dominated by one downbeat story after another as members of the educated class explore and enjoy the humiliation of the capitalist vulgarians.

Mr. Brook’s assertion that risk is out of favor is a bit ingenuous, most Americans are not adverse to risk. We live with it in our daily lives. We could die in our daily commute (if we still have a daily commute). It’s the abrogation of risk onto the taxpayer we have problems with. It’s the disingenuous use of the tax laws that allow bonus payments to be deducted from the corporate tax liability, but not the excessive salaries that those bonuses  actually equate to. Then the audacity of these financial titans to reward themselves for their abuse of the American trust by taking taxpayer money to pay bonuses to the very people who brought down the house…Get real.

If anything comes from this era of American history, I only hope the lessons learned last a bit longer than the last batch. All of this returning to the school of hard knocks isn’t really what I had in mind when I wanted a continuing education that would last a lifetime…