Call me an American

When I was a girl not yet in high school, I used to pull dandelions out of my father's grass lawns in the summer. He paid me a dime for every one I pulled up. I worked hard to make as much money as I could, and it was difficult: he inspected each plant in the wheelbarrow to make sure I had gotten the entire root, so that it wouldn't grow back. He was a “reliability” engineer who worked in quality control for a large company.

One Saturday, a neighborhood friend of mine walked over to ask me to play with her.

“Whatcha doing?”

As I explained why I couldn't play, I had an idea.

“If you want to do it with me, I'll give you a dime for every 10 you dig out!” She was enthusiastic. I didn't tell her I was getting a dollar for every dime I would pay her. Soon I had three or four of my friends making money for me.

Until Dad came out to make his inspection. One of the kids told him what I was doing. She wasn't unhappy or anything, it just came up.

My father turned to me and asked me to follow him to the side of the garage. My face was already hot, I already knew I had done something wrong. When he turned to me, he said solemnly, “Nancy, what you are doing isn't fair.”

“But I thought of it,” I said in my defense. “They don't have to do it. They don't mind.”

“No,” he ruled. It isn't fair, and you know it.”

I did know it. I went back around the corner of the garage and gave them a raise. We would all get equal pay for equal work.

That was my first lesson in capitalist ethics.

My second lesson came decades later, when I came to understand something else about capitalist ethics. The newspapers and restaurants in Sandpoint were struggling when COVID hit. The Give-Meal-Get-A-Meal Program put $10,000 into our local economy, and we all benefitted by helping our restaurants, newspapers, our friends, and ourselves through those first months. Capitalism works well when money is circulating freely, supporting businesses and workers. When too much money sits and does nothing, as it has during this pandemic, people lose their jobs, their businesses, their savings, their health care, and their mental health. When that happens all of us get poorer, not to mention gloomier.

Putting money into infrastructure, safety, health care, and education makes all of us financially better off. The rich, too. That's what happened after World War II when taxes paid for the education of soldiers and companies paid for health care for their workers. They did it and they made more money and collected more taxes. It's not only unfair for some people to acquire wealth and not give enough back to other people. It's financially irresponsible.

A friend of mine told me recently she became a Republican because Republicans value individual responsibility.

Call me a Republican. Call me a Democrat. Call me a responsible independent, or a tea partier. Whatever you call me, I believe in individual responsibility and I vote for people who believe the same: that they are in it for everybody, morally and financially, no matter what they call themselves. We are the people I call Americans.