My 15-year-old great-nephew Brody is here in San Diego with me, my son Dietrich, and my two friends for Comic-Con. He lives in Galloway, New Jersey, where I grew up, and says he’s loving California.

Our first night at Comic-Con when we got back to our room he asked me an economic question that I answered thoughtfully. I told him that history has shown that the free flow of ideas and culture between societies benefits everyone:  that the secret to Genghis Khan’s stunning success was that when he took control over a group he shared with them the technology he’d gathered elsewhere, and let them keep their own culture. This meant that the people Khan conquered generally did better under his rule than under previous rulers, and did so because Khan supported the exchange of ideas and commerce. China, by contrast, had a literally walled-off society that halted progress for hundreds of years.

Thinking about China brought to mind the joys of true capitalism, and the irony that Communist China, with its mandated economy, is working to succeed with capitalism. True capitalism, I told Brody, benefits everyone:  As opposed to other systems where you might wind up stranded your entire life in your current low position, people allowed into the market have a chance to improve their lot, and a stake in doing so. A truly open, free market encourages innovation and the spread of wealth. Unfortunately, our current system, which benefits the massively wealthy at the terrible expense of the middle class, is closer to the rigged economy our elected leaders say they abhor. As we strip-mine the middle class, through taxes and fees, and move toward shrinking benefits in order to continue this massive transfer of wealth upward, we increase economic anxiety, which is fueling so much of the ground-level horror we’re seeing on the streets:  rampant homelessness, enraged shooters, road rage, and an overall creeping psychosis. Want to improve the feelings of everyone in our community? Fix the tax code.

Finally, I said, the further shame is that we’re so indebting your generation — via absurdly high college tuition, expensive student loans, and a federal deficit that will throw a lid onto the economy — that we’re making you pay the mortgage on our current, short-term success. If we really wanted to invest in the future, we’d build out our infrastructure so that we weren’t lagging the Scandinavian nations (!!!) and the emerging Asian nations, and we’d actually invest in young people:  restructure the cost and burden of higher education, and figure out a way to help young people afford homes earlier in their lives so that they could accrue wealth.

At this point, I caught myself and wondered just how far afield I’d wandered from his initiating question. So I looked at him and said, “Wait, what was your question?”

He said, “Do you ever actually find anything good in the dollar boxes of comic books?”

This entry was posted on Friday, July 19th, 2019 at 10:41 am and is filed under Comics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.