Herman Cain disqualifies himself

Several weeks ago, I overheard an elderly woman on the bus complaining to a friend that corporations didn't care about people like her.

I was tempted to ask her to imagine that one of those corporations produced a product which she bought regularly because of its high quality and low price. I then would have asked her to further imagine that a competitor came out with a better product at a lower price still.

Would she continue to patronize the first company? I'm certain that she would have replied in the negative; after all, she appeared to have lived long enough to accrue at least a bit of common sense.

I then would have replied, "WHAT!? You don't care about that first company? How utterly heartless of you!"

My point would have been that it's no more a corporation's business to care about her than it is her business to care about that corporation. Rather, it's the role of both to act in their own economic self-interest. That's the way our system works- and our system works more often than not because that's the way human nature works. It's perfectly true, of course, that to act otherwise might, under certain circumstances, be praiseworthy, as an example  of selflessness above and beyond what could be considered normal or reasonable. But our economic system is built on the notion that people- and corporations- act, not out of charity toward one another, but out of a desire to benefit economically.

The people who are "occupying" Wall Street and demonstrating in other cities all over America fail to grasp that basic fact of economics. They do not deserve to be taken seriously. As one of the many Americans who have suffered a great deal from the current economic downturn- a disaster caused not by corporate greed alone, but by corporate greed combined precisely by a failure on the part of corporations to act intelligently in their own self-interest (bubbles- including the housing bubble- are the result of stupidity and hubris in a far more immediate sense than they are the fault of the profit motive as such), I share their annoyance at the behavior of Wall Street in the crisis, and a part of me is outraged at the fact that corporate bailouts, golden parachutes and simple institutional insulation from the consequences of their own actions have protected the people who actually deserve to suffer.

But I don't blame capitalism for the shape the economy is in- and whether they are honest enough to admit it or not, that is precisely what the demonstrators are doing.

I have to admit to a soft spot in my heart for presidential candidate Herman Cain. True, he lacks the experience in government a president needs; I'm committed to Mitt Romney, with Jon Huntsman as my fall-back choice. One by one,all of  the other Republican candidates have made statements or taken positions so feckless as to disqualify them, in my view, as potential presidents. Until now, I hadn't come across that sort of thing from Cain, a self-made man who, as an African-American, is in a unique position to reach out to an original part of its constituency which the Republican party lost a long time ago.

But alas, Mr. Cain has joined the club. He, too, has disqualified himself as a potential president. He, too, has joined the ranks of the Ron Pauls and the Michele Bachmanns and the Rick Perrys, and become nothing more than a bad joke.

He told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, "Don't blame Wall Street. Don't blame the big banks. If  you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself."

I'm sorry, Mr. Cain, but I can't do that. And I won't do that. I'm about to be employed full-time in a permanent job for the first time since the collapse of '08, and that hiatus is not my fault. Nor are the millions of Americans who have spent these nightmare years in the same boat as I have- or worse- to blame for the nightmare that their lives have become.

Most of us are not looking to assign blame. We'd be satisfied with a job instead.

And as it happens, we live in an age in which illiterate techies are highly employable by a society which does not particularly value the ability, for example, to write a coherent sentence or spell one's way out of a paper bag. Age alone is enough to keep an unemployed person unemployed, and a shocking number of companies follow the unconscionable practice of refusing to even consider employing anyone who has been out of work for a year or more. This does more than blight the lives of a very large number of Americans who find themselves in such a position through no fault of their own; if it continues, it will cripple the economy (and by extension the very companies which follow this policy) by creating an unsupportably huge percentage of the population who will be permanent non-consumers. And no, Mr. C, It will not be their fault. And both they and the millions of other Americans who are facing a crisis they never imagined they'd experience deserve better than to have you tell them that it is.

Good grief, man. You're running for president! Anyone who can so completely lose touch with his own political self-interest as to make such a statement at a moment when the huge percentage of Americans who are unemployed is the biggest issue facing the nation raises serious doubts about whether he has the judgment required to be president. Mr. Cain, you statement  isn't simply incredibly insensitive; it puts you in the same category with Michele Bachmann and her attribution of "blame" for the Arab Spring to President Obama!

And yes, I, too, am tempted to blame Wall Street, to some extent. If I don't, it's because selfishness is a part of the human condition- the very human condition which makes capitalism the most successful system in history at providing for the needs of the people who live under it. So is stupidity. The tragedy is that capitalism is unable to turn stupidity to our benefit the way it normally turns selfishness.

No, I'm not interested in blaming anybody for the current situation. I'm interested in finding a solution. I think the Republicans are more likely to lead us to that solution, and to a restoration of the prosperity which now seems to be a thing of the past, than are President Obama and the Democrats.

But I cannot consider a candidate with the insensitivity, the cluelessness, and the unmitigated gall to tell me and the millions of others who are suffering the consequences of a crisis we never made that it's somehow our fault. And nobody else should, either.

This has got to be the most idiotic- and the most disqualifying- remark any presidential candidate has made in my lifetime.