The Common Good

by Robert B. Reich

A love of country based on the common good entails obligations to other people, not to national symbols. Instead of demanding displays of respect for the flag and the anthem, it requires that all of us take on a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going—that we pay taxes in full rather than seek tax loopholes or squirrel away money abroad, that we volunteer time and energy to improving the community and country, serve on school boards and city councils, refrain from political contributions that corrupt our politics, and blow the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing our jobs.

In his “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” (1770), Burke warned that “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Almost two centuries later, Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

Some of our ideas about what we owe each other are also rooted in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. In the earliest days of Christianity, a church father named John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) wrote: “This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point, namely, the seeking of the common good…for nothing can so make a person an imitator of Christ as caring for his neighbors.”

Before then it was assumed that large corporations had responsibilities to all their “stakeholders”—not just their shareholders but also their workers, the towns and cities where their headquarters and facilities were located, and the nation.

Goizueta, CEO of Coca-Cola, proclaimed in 1988, “I wrestle with how to build shareholder value from the time I get up in the morning to the time I go to bed. I even think about it when I am shaving.” Goizueta’s obsession was quite different from the views of his predecessors, such as Coca-Cola’s president William Robinson, who in 1959 told an audience at Fordham Law School that executives should not put stockholders first. They should “balance” the interests of the stockholder, the community, the customer, and the employee.

Most important, corporations began inundating politicians with money for their campaigns. Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, corporate Political Action Committees increased their expenditures on congressional races nearly fivefold. Labor union PAC spending rose only about half as fast. By the 2016 campaign cycle, corporations and Wall Street contributed $34 for every $1 donated by labor unions and all public interest organizations combined. Wealthy individuals also accounted for a growing share. In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent. The Supreme Court has made all this worse through a series of decisions holding that money is speech under the First Amendment and corporations are people.

Businesses have also dangled before public officials the lure of well-paying jobs after government. In the 1970s only about 3 percent of retiring members of Congress went on to become Washington lobbyists. By 2016, fully half of all retiring senators and 42 percent of retiring representatives had turned to lobbying, regardless of party affiliation. This wasn’t because more recent retirees have had fewer qualms than their predecessors about making money off their contacts in government. It was because the financial rewards from corporate lobbying had ballooned. The revolving door rotates the other way, too: If a lobbyist can land a plum job in an administration, he or she becomes even more valuable on leaving. In his first six months as president, Trump handed control of every major regulatory agency to lobbyists from the industries they would oversee.

Not surprisingly, the day-to-day decisions emanating from Congress and the White House no longer reflect the views of average Americans. After examining 1,799 policy issues in detail, two eminent researchers, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concluded that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Intellectual property rights—patents, trademarks, and copyrights—have been enlarged and extended, allowing pharmaceuticals, high-tech, biotechnology, and many entertainment companies to preserve their monopolies longer. This has meant higher prices for average consumers, including the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation. At the same time, antitrust laws have been relaxed, resulting in large profits for firms like Monsanto, which sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn; for a handful of high-tech companies with market power over network portals and platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google); cable companies with little or no broadband competition (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon); and the largest Wall Street banks, among others. As with the broadening of intellectual property rights, the relaxing of antitrust laws has raised prices and reduced services for average Americans. We have the most expensive and slowest broadband of any industrialized nation, for example. In 2016, The Economist magazine reported that two-thirds of all corporate sectors have become more concentrated since the 1990s, making corporations far more profitable than at any time since the 1920s.

To attribute all this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to be blind to the disproportionate political power of America’s economic elites over the rules of the game, and their failure to use that power to deliver rising or even stable incomes and jobs to most of the rest of the nation. It is to ignore the increasing willingness of moneyed interests to rig the system for their own benefit, and their dwindling concern for the common good.

In 1963 over 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time; nowadays only 16 percent do. In 1964 more than 60 percent thought government was “run for the benefit of all the people,” while just 29 percent said government was “pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” Nowadays the numbers are almost reversed, with 76 percent believing government is run “by a few big interests” and just 19 percent saying government is run “for the benefit of all.”

Patagonia, a large apparel manufacturer based in Ventura, California, for example, has organized itself as a “benefit corporation”—a for-profit company whose articles of incorporation require that it take into account the interests of workers, the community, and the environment, as well as shareholders. Benefit corporations are certified and their performance is regularly reviewed by nonprofit third-party entities, such as B Lab. By 2017, thirty-one states had enacted laws allowing companies to incorporate in this way, thereby giving CEOs and directors explicit legal authority to consider the interest of all stakeholders.

In 2016, one out of every four Americans believed the sun rotates around the earth; a third did not believe in evolution; a third did not accept the reality of global warming, and even among those who did, many did not believe humans are at least partly responsible. Without a shared truth, democratic deliberation is impossible.

2016 presidential election, only 18 percent of Americans said they trusted national news media, according to the Pew Research Center. In a Gallup poll at about the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed the mainstream press was filled with “fake news.” Contrast this with American opinion almost five decades before. In 1972, in the wake of investigative reporting that revealed truths about Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, 72 percent of Americans expressed trust and confidence in the press.

A Harvard study found that in the 2008 presidential election the major TV networks devoted a total of 220 minutes to reporting candidates’ positions on issues of public policy; four years later, the networks allocated 114 minutes to policy; in 2016, they devoted 32 minutes. Hillary Clinton’s policy ideas and proposals received almost no attention while her emails commanded 100 minutes of airtime.

Such an education must also urge and equip young people to communicate with others who do not share their views. It should teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility that their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, and to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do. It should enable them to work with others to separate facts and logic from values and beliefs, and help them find facts and apply logic together even if their values and beliefs differ.

These lessons cannot be learned only in the classroom. A true civic education also requires learning by doing. Young people must develop the “habits of the heart,” as Tocqueville called them, by taking on responsibilities in their communities—working in homeless shelters and soup kitchens, tutoring, mentoring, coaching kids’ sports teams, helping the elderly and infirm. Young people need to move out of their bubbles of class, race, religion, and ideology, and to go to places and engage in activities where people look different from themselves, and have different beliefs and outlooks from their own. They must learn to communicate with them. They need to learn how to learn from them.