The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/What’s Wrong with America: Five Proposals: Difference between revisions

Should this incentive take hold, the loss of revenue in the media and in the advertising industry over the next few decades will, no matter how enormous, prove smaller than the gain of living once more in an economy that functions with skill and dedication. The alternative is to keep on polishing the service while the guts of American enterprise rot within. Who will be the first Kamikaze Congressman or high-dive Senator who will dare to give us a shot at becoming competitive with the Japanese?

Serving in the Army was the worst experience of my life, and the most valuable. It left me considerably more modest about my middle-class virtues and vastly more respectful of the average man. I am sympathetic, therefore, to William Buckley’s idea of a national work force, but I would go further. Let the draft be compulsory if one chooses to serve no more than one year. If one volunteers for two, one can select the nature of one’s work. One can be a guard in prison, a counselor to the homeless, a road and bridge builder, a forester, a subway guard like the Guardian Angels — the list of difficult and necessary jobs that can use young people is endless. It is not impossible that we will become in the process a more democratic, compassionate and knowledgeable republic.

Most young men and women who are on drugs get there because it provides them with an inner life that makes their existence supportable. To maintain that inner life, they lie, cheat, steal, mug, and generally ravage the civil body. Intolerable ghetto conditions are not going to disappear any more quickly than the need for an inner life. So the addiction of young people to drugs is likely to continue. Marijuana, while as prone to encouraging one’s vices as alcohol, does, unlike other drugs, enable one to work, live, love, and be reasonably decent to one’s fellow man. It is also inexpensive. One can afford it on a forty-hour-a-week salary. Ergo, legalize marijuana, and increase the penalties for cocaine, heroin, crack, LSD, and all the other white powders.

Put the copper penny in a museum. It probably costs five times more in time and money than it is worth. If the average grocery store clerk earns six dollars an hour, that comes to one cent every ten seconds. The time spent in counting the pennies in the change can take up those ten seconds, lengthens the time spent on line at checkout counters, and deludes us into thinking the penny has value. I do not even speak of the coining process, but how expensive is it to make a penny, wrap it, ship it to banks, audit it, and so on? Surely, the process comes to more than one cent per penny. Moreover, it deludes us into thinking we are back in our childhood when in fact we are in a nonstop sliding inflation. Abolishing the penny would, therefore, jolt our sense of the real a little closer to reality — a mental adjustment every American can use after our eight lost years with the Pied Piper who led us children down the road to the economic bog. Let the last of the copper pennies carry Ronald Reagan’s face. He can be commemorated for leaching out their last vestige of value.

Let’s have a law that makes it illegal to sue doctors for malpractice. Medicare and Medicaid will be vastly less expensive once doctors don’t have to pay prodigious amounts for insurance.