McCain says he’s for education. But to oppose spending money to replace the Adler projector that was too old to get parts for––what with holography and laser technology being way out of date––his complaint proves McCain’s real contempt of knowledge and education.

What truly excites McCain is spending our national treasury on his wars. For the moment, the United States has most of the world’s top universities, but the rest of our educational system is mired in the dark side, thanks in great part to Republican opposition to taxes, except those that don’t go for their own personal enrichment.
Giving students access to the experience of sitting in front of the universe and dreaming about the star children we should and could be is a good thing, not a bad thing, Mr. McCain.

Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has had no affinity for education and especially for science and the arts. Many of them are essentially threatened by education. They proudly venerate ignorance. They venerate creationism over evolution, for example.

Still, I found McCain’s insistence on ignorance unnerving.

It’s an obvious fact that unleashing scientific imagination pays big economic dividends—you have only to think about transistors, computers, or space exploration to realize that.

But McCain is a Republican, a worshiper of Ronald Reagan, who also worshiped ignorance almost as much as he did the Almighty Dollar. He venerated the rich and hated the poor, perhaps because he had come out of Depression-era poverty and never wanted to be poor again. Like Reagan, McCain is a proponent of a certain kind of advice for the working class. “Drop Dead. You got to have billions before we’ll give you more billions of taxpayer’s dollars.”
McCain, of course, is like General Smedly Butler, a creature of Wall Street. But more than being a creature of Wall Street, he’s a member of the nation’s Warrior Aristocracy going back to the days when the McCains were a big slave-holding family. 

He obviously does not understand that this country’s democracy is based on the idea that the Commander in Chief is a civilian and that not all wisdom in matters of life and death and survival can or should only be made by a member of the warrior class.

People correctly find Wall Street a kind of baffling place. It's an example of ignorance masquerading behind bogus knowledge and expertise. It's a strange kind of place, which anoints its own experts, and then is contradicted by no one. Yet in the last Great Depression, President Roosevelt's used Kensyian economics to get the country out of a Depression caused by the 1929 Wall Street collapse. Kensyian economics essentially meant you invested money in people directly, which would ultimately benefit the whole society, even the rich.

After World War II, Keynes’ “trickle up” economics was replaced by the “trickle down” economics of Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago.

Ronald Reagan’s mantra of “free markets” when he became President in the eighties was not just coincidence.
It's an ideology that combines a belief in magic as well as obfuscation. It's an economics that has been promoted by the Nobel Prize committee for years now. The idea, of course, is a myth. Free Markets never survive the inevitable march of capitalism toward monopoly capitalism dominated by financial boom and gloom.

President Roosevelt, however, was intrigued by the economics proposed by John Maynard Keynes. In the early thirties, Roosevelt faced the Great Depression, a gift thrust on him and the nation by Republican thieving and stealing at a level not seen until today.

Stockbrokers jumped to their death in droves. The banks closed. There was no federal protection of the customer’s money. Capitalism appeared to be dead.

It was a time of massive political upheaval in Europe. Hitler and Mussolini dominated the scene because of the ruling classes fear of the population, which was rapidly turning Left. Fascism was created by the industrialists and bankers to remove the annoyance of real democracy.

There are some ironies here as well. Mussolini and Hitler had to bill their movements as “national socialism,” because a great part of the population believed in socialism. But fascism never proved to be benign socialism. It was raw, naked industrialists’ power, unhampered by any pretense of democracy.

Roosevelt sought a third way. Although many members of the ruling class berated Roosevelt, which he was a member of. The fact is he saved capitalism by injecting an element of socialism into the mix as opposed to the total free enterprise, which had preceded the Depression.

He also had a commitment to the concept of democracy, which in Europe the left and the right were less concerned with.

Just as Milton Friedman became the economist of the eighties by pushing the idea of unfettered capitalism, so was John Maynard Keynes the economist of the New Deal.

He was British, a high level mathematician intrigued by the science of probabilities. He then turned his focus to the “Dismal Science.”

Keynes was one of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals who populated London at the beginning of the last century.

He was not particularly a socialist, but his economics borrowed from Adam Smith and from Karl Marx, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill. During the Great Depression, he advocated spending on public works in order to stimulate demand. He was the major force behind the economic thinking of the New Deal. Sometimes his philosophy was called “pump priming.” The result was a new generation of post offices and hospitals, roads and such and an outburst of some of America’s greatest music, theater and literature as the result of federal support of the arts.

It’s ironic that the Bush Administration, having caused this collapse, has now resorted to nationalizing banks… sort of.
And why not? If the bankers are incapable of doing the job, nationalizing is completely acceptable.

A friend of mine with an unusual and somewhat perverse intelligence is a bank vice president. He is, as is appropriate for a man of his position, rather conservative politically. But he also likes to say that if you got a license to run a bank it's not much different from a license to steal. You can only lose money, he says, if you are incredibly stupid or incredibly criminal. Anyone who can remember the Keating scandal, with which John McCain was associated, can understand what he's saying.

In Europe, many banks are municipally owned. Municipal banks tend to be more socially conscious and not only motivated by greed and profit. And they work with at least the efficiency of Wall Street.

We have been trained to always hate socialism and venerate capitalism, and not a combination of the two as is done in many European social democracies. Perhaps a capitalism that truly reflect individual abilities, such as can be seen in publishing, restaurants, boutiques ventures, should be tolerated. Monopoly capitalism, such as is now being created for the bankers on Wall Street, should not be the final arbiters of the nation’s medical, housing and transportation needs.

In past centuries, America found new vigor in its economy by reducing the power of the great “trusts” which dominated the land. Such eras were usually announced with terrible financial collapses, like we have today. The idea that a market economy is always the best can be a dubious proposition. The hunt for just profits by humans does not always produce the greatest good. It is to deny the best impulses of the human spirit –– the power of scientific imagination and the hunt for truth, the artistic impulse, the philosophical impulse, maybe even the religious impulse. These do have their legitimate functions.

Dare to consider an even more terrible possibility. What do Wall Street’s pieces of paper or entries into a computer system really signify? What is the real source of a society’s wealth?

Wealth is human labor, and that includes the labor of robots, which may become a reality one day. This is a terrible suggestion, of course, since it was originally voiced by Karl Marx.

Karl Marx's partner Friedrich Engel offered an even more intriguing notion He said it was man's opposable thumb that is the source of all wealth. The ability to hold a hammer, a nail, a screwdriver, is everything. Dolphins may be more intelligent than us, but because they can’t grasp tools, they can’t make printing presses and museums and pass their culture on from generation to generation. The purpose of education is to grasp the totality of these things.

There are many paradigms for organizing human societies. In Europe, social democracy, which combines democracy and socialism and capitalism, has served people well. At least no worse than our current system is serving us.
 

Lionel Rolfe is the author of several books, including "Literary L.A.," "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather" and "Fat Man on the Left,” among others.