Free Lunch
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
By David Cay Johnston
Portfolio, 2007
352 pages
“The country bathed in God is now practising an economic driven morality that would cause any observant god to loose a flood.”
Free Lunch could be dedicated to Sgt. Friday: “Just the facts Ma’am.” In that sense it is the book of an award winning New York Times reporter who has written 26 chapters demonstrating the thievery that has been standard practise for over two decades in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Each chapter tells a narrative story or two that should have produced a response that would have dwarfed what is presently going on in Greece.
Assets earned by the majority of house houses – most now containing at least two wage earners who are working over 350 hours a year, just to maintain: a kind of running in place that calls to mind a treadmill – have hardly increased in decades, while a relatively small group of fellow Americans have made out like the bandits that just paid a visit to Harry Winstons just before closing time.
Abetting this trillion dollar transfer of assets have been most Congressmen, so the great theft could be called legal if without conscience.
The facts devastate: the reporting is as good as you could hope for. It is a quasi-legal bill of particulars that is an indictment of the entire American system that is now a sad parody of the hopes expressed by our founders and expressed so succinctly: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”
Goals and guiding principles that have been mocked in all aspects of life by recent American collective behavior. Behavior, as it relates to all aspects of our economic life, that Free Lunch describes with great clarity.
His book provides the basic facts for the death of capitalism, though he does not talk in such terms and Karl Marx whose shadow now hangs over our age once again, in spite of the collapse of the USSR, is absent from the book and the index.
Johnston relies upon the bible and Adam Smith as his strictures are moral, as are the faults he castigates so thoroughly, not technical or historical.
This book was finished before our current disaster emerged, but listen to Johnston’s prescience: “What makes such huge returns possible is not just computer programs that spot pricing gaps. What fuels hedge funds is debt. Lots and lots of debt. Hedge funds and banks have become joined like algae and fungus to form financial lichen. And just as attractive lichens can be poisonous, so can this financial symbiosis, with its attractive investment returns, turn toxic.” (p. 251-2)
“Of course, if things go badly, the investor can be wiped out. Banks foolish to lend so much can also suffer huge losses. If the banks have no idea how many intertwined, cross-connected deals their money is in, and something unexpected goes wrong, it could wreak havoc with the global financial markets.” (p. 252)
And the kicker: “that consideration goes to lenders and virtually none to borrowers, is central to the creed of government as a source of greater wealth for those already rich enough to have money to lend.”
His immersion in the reporting of the scurrilous dealings that now characterize our social/economic behavior, as presently emblemized by the Governor of Illinois, created a deep insight into our greed and its functioning, marking Free Lunch a wonderful primer.
We now need lots of good theory to put it all in Context and those who have the courage to talk about what is going on: the extreme class war and the turning of democratic America into an oligarchy run by the rich.
Read Free Lunch in the meantime, as facts begin any real process of change and if we are to survive as a nation we must fully expose what is behind the facts that Johnston lays out so well and heed Adam Smith: “what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
