Stop the presses! A world-shattering event has just occurred. A French citizen has renounced their citizenship to avoid paying high taxes. Gerard Depardieu has embraced Russian citizenship in an argument with the French government over high taxes. Putin has offered Gerard a job and a free apartment in Russia. Gerard is unlikely to move to Russia, I think he would be out of his mind to move there, but he has found a way to beat the French tax system. The WSJ reports that 600-800 wealthy French people leave the country each year. Our taxes are not as high as France, but the ability of our rich to avoid paying taxes is just as real. The Depardieu article reminded me of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I am still working my way through the book, it is a laborious read, but the current event demonstrates how reality represents fiction. Who is John Galt?
However, I just discovered another book, one that I am going to buy, entitled “The Rise of Meritocracy.” It was published in 1958, and dealt with a society obsessed with talent. “The date was 2034, and psychologists had perfected the art of IQ testing. But far from promoting social harmony, the preoccupation with talent had produced a social breakdown. The losers in the talent wars were doubly unhappy, conscious not only that they were failures but that they deserved to be failures. Eventually they revolted against their masters.” I wonder why something like this would happen?
I think it is a result of meritocracy leading to cronyism. The talent evolves from ability to knowledge. In other words, it is “who you know not what you know.” Our current meritocratic expression, at its worst, has become cosmopolitan. Samuel Huntington once described the elites as denationalized and separate from the “thank God for America” public. Many today denounce these denationalized elites, “and complain that the country has been hijacked by a self-satisfied Ivy league coterie that cares more about the good opinion of their fellow meritocrats in the United Nations than about the fate of ordinary citizens.” In China, these types of elitists are called bananas, “yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” The meritocracy of talent based on ability becomes, a meritocracy based on relationships.
Both of these problems are real, the bright flight and the meritocratic cronyism, and require those of us who are not part of the talented elite to stand up and say enough is enough. Everyone needs a fair chance, which means there needs to be some repairing of our governmental system. I agree with the comment I read this morning in Masters of Management, “The success of advanced economies is increasingly dependent not on their physical capital but on their capacity to mobilized citizen’s brainpower.”
Right now our ability to mobilize brainpower is hampered by our political and economic situation. I am constantly amazed at why our elected yahoos can’t deal with our debt and spending problems. It wasn’t until this morning I understood why. Reported today in the WSJ that our president does not believe, “that Washington has a spending problem,” he believes our massive deficits are a result of a “health care problem.” We definitely have a healthcare problem, but that is not the cause of our huge deficits. We have a spending problem.
John Kotter, in Leading Change, notes that the number one reason a major organizational change event fails is due to the lack of urgency. In other words, the organization doesn’t see the need for changing. This is the number one reason our elected yahoos are not dealing with the situation. They have a leader who doesn’t see the need for change. As much as I’d like to say that one side wants to deal with the overspending, I can’t say that. Both sides are invested in the current economic structure, and neither will change it because they are the ones that made it.
Eventually they will raise taxes to a point that like the French, our elites will begin to migrate to tax havens, even more than they already are (McAffee), and our meritocracy will lose the value it currently has by focusing resources on the coterie (education becomes so expensive that that only ones that can afford it are the Ivy League rich). That is unless those that are not a part of the coterie stands up and says, enough!
And that is my thought for the day!
DOCMARTIN1: It's Business and Personal 