Republicans complain endlessly about “The ‘Nanny’ State”. Do anything good for the people – that’s “The ‘Nanny’ State.” Can’t we do anything for ourselves? What happened to self-reliance?
Actually self-reliance doesn’t work by itself. We call it self-reliance when young people put themselves through college, but jobs have to be available and pay enough for young people to put themselves through. The college has to be there, affordable, with the support needed to to provide great educations. I remember hearing Marty Silverman, one of Albany Law’s major benefactors, describe putting himself through law school on the profits of a small gas station. That says a great deal about the relative cost of a law school education. I started law school in 1962 with a full $1600 scholarship. In today’s dollars it would have been about $14,000. Try that now. My father, by the way, was a high school teacher; mother had just died.
Based on his appreciation of knowledge workers, Peter Drucker, a leading business mind of the twentieth century, saw that our leading industries are where our best and brightest graduates had gone twenty-year earlier. Those graduates created the strength of the industries they entered.
The US built the world’s envy of an education system – everyone wants to study here – though, ironically, we are now letting that educational system atrophy. Power and economic success followed the creation of our educational system. When Kermit Hall was President of the University at Albany he addressed a breakfast crowd downtown at Whiteman, Osterman and Hanna. There were two messages he wanted to get across. One was that he had been to China and studied their university system. He wanted us to know that they were building great new universities with prodigious speed and scale. The other was that corporations that are based on technology, intellectual-property or other special skills locate where they can get the best and brightest to work for them.
That has nothing to do with a nanny state. It is about making excellent investments in workforce development. The same is true of the success of the rest of the so-called Brick countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China; and the Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. The newer so-called Mint countries – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey – are trying the same strategy, though international politics and civil wars hold some of them back.
By contrast, Republicans continue to feed us outmoded thinking, outmoded economics, outmoded ideas about how to strengthen our communities, our industries, our education and our people. They deserve an F.
Deriding the nanny state for investing in its people isn’t even efficient in the short run, forcing business to compete for staff on the world market and outsource their work to places where it can be done by the world’s best and brightest. That, by the way, used to be us. And it could be again. But it’s not magic. It’s based on investments in people, not handouts to corporations. Give people what they need to succeed and the values we inculcate into them will have a chance to shine. Deny them the basics and whistle our future into the wind.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.