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American Dreams

Other People's Money

by Bill Stevens

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It's easier to live well as a poor person in a rich country and easier to live well as a rich person in a poor one. This might not seem true, but it is. I only started to figure this out during the last few years.

I have been comparing notes with friends of mine who live abroad about things like gasoline (or petrol) prices, what it costs to do transnational money transfers and the like. What I have learned is that it costs me less for so many things, living here in the United States, the richest country on Earth, than it does people in countries with lower per capita incomes. Here are a couple of examples:

1. If an American had to pay the equivalent of $50 to fill the tank of a compact car, as many people abroad do, there would be riots in the streets. We pay more than a buck twenty a gallon and it's a major nightly news topic.
   
   
2. In some countries, I have learned, Western Union will charge you a fee to convert a money transfer to US dollars from your local currency and then a very high fee for the service. I've transferred money to friends abroad from here in the US for a sliding (downward) fee that starts at $15 for the first $100 and Western Union converts it to the recipient's local currency at no cost to me.

How can this happen? Well, I'm thinking that it's because we've gotten in the habit here in the US of A of passing on our costs to other countries.

It crossed my mind that, as a tenet of American foreign policy, we might believe that this arrangement is a quid pro quo for our taking on the task of fighting wars for the rest of the world... but I didn't see how other countries would go along with that idea.

In fact, when I do bother to get a sense of what people in other countries are thinking about us Americans, I get this sneaking suspicion that we are in denial about the world's view of us.

As in, they think we are loud-mouthed pigs.

Since, as I've written here at the G21, I'm a member of the newly job-seeking, I am happy that my country passes its costs on to the rest of the world right now. I couldn't imagine having to live with the tax burden of an Englishman or a Swede, the gas prices of a Japanese, or the import duties of an Australian. And if I were in business, I certainly wouldn't tolerate the bank or Western Union transfer fees that people in other countries around the world must tolerate. I'm an American. I deserve better.

On the other hand, if I were rich, I imagine I'd like to live in a poor country like Russia or Mexico or Indonesia. I could bribe my way into getting things that other people couldn't, or that were claimed to be illegal. I could have my taxes waived altogether. And I could enjoy the satisfaction of having a daily and graphic reminder, simply by walking the local streets, of how much more blessed my life was than any of the other people around me. That's why I think it would be easier to live as a rich person in a poor country than it would here in the United States.

But

1. I'm not rich and
2. I do live here in America.

And I'm darned glad I do. The rest of the world is subsidizing my lifestyle, what there is of it.

In a way, you could say they are also subsidizing my ideas about freedom. Freedom in America has come more and more, when I listen to political speeches and talk radio, to mean that I have "choice." Choice is the essence of freedom, which means the more things I have to choose from the more free I am. Choice is the cornerstone of what it means to be an American. That's why we need more charter schools and school vouchers and more kinds of breakfast cereal and toothpaste.

And the more choices I get, as an American, the more choices I feel I am entitled to. When I had the choice of three television stations, the idea of having 100 sounded like the very expression of freedom to me. Now that I have over a hundred (I think. I haven't looked at them all) I think the idea of 500 channels would be great.

I wish that people in the rest of the world could enjoy all these choices, and thereby be more free and more like me, but they can't afford it. That's too bad, but that's just the way things are.

The only thing that really bothers me about all this is treaties like NAFTA, because I don't understand NAFTA. I have the feeling that Ross Perot was right when he said that after NAFTA was ratified by the Congress we would hear this big sucking sound, our jobs being sucked out of this country to foreign countries. It certainly seems like that to me.

The only thing we had left going for us was all those new and spiffy dot-com companies that were on every magazine cover last year. Well, I guess they are on every magazine cover this year, too, but next to pictures of tomb stones.

So now we don't even have that.

And from what I've been reading, it seems that NAFTA allows companies to sue countries. Yeah, companies are not only more powerful than people now, they are so powerful they even over-rule the laws of sovereign nations. I was reading about it at the New York Times Web site a week or so ago. Listen to this:

"Their meetings are secret. Their members are generally unknown. The decisions they reach need not be fully disclosed. Yet the way a small group of international tribunals handles disputes between investors and foreign governments has led to national laws being revoked, justice systems questioned and environmental regulations challenged...."

"The tribunals have been used in Nafta disputes for only a few years, but the complaints they have handled have already had many repercussions, including these:

• " The Canadian government lifted restrictions on manufacturing an ethanol-based gasoline additive that it considered hazardous after an American manufacturer said that the ban hurt its business.
  
  
• " A tribunal ordered Mexico to pay an American company $16.7 million after finding that local environmental laws prohibiting a toxic- waste-processing plant that the company was building were tantamount to expropriation.
  
  
• " A Canadian-based funeral company is asking the United States government for $725 million in compensation after a Mississippi jury found the company guilty in 1995 of trying to put a local funeral home out of business, and levied $500 million in damages. The company contends that the jury sought to punish it because it is foreign. If the tribunal awards compensation, critics say, all jury awards involving foreign investors may be challenged.
  
  
• " United Parcel Service, the package-delivery company, has filed a complaint contending that the very existence of the publicly financed Canadian postal system represents unfair competition that conflicts with Canada's obligations under Nafta. Critics worry that if the tribunal upholds the U.P.S. claim, government participation in any service that competes with the private sector will be threatened..."

--- from "Nafta's Powerful Little Secret," ANTHONY DePALMA, New York Times

This kind of secret economic change has me worried because it challenges my freedoms. Especially my freedom to have a better life using other people's money, especially the money of people who live overseas, so I'll never see them and never have to feel guilty about it.