Here is a transcript of Jim’s address to the Columbia Chapter of the Military Officers’ Association of America (MOAA) from October, 11, 2008

JIM MOELLER:

I want to thank you all for inviting me and for being willing to hear the candidates speak about the issues.
Harry Truman, when he was U.S President, once addressed the Washington Garden Club and kept referring to ‘good manure’ that must be used on flowers.
Some society ladies later complained to the First Lady Margaret Truman, “Bess, can’t you get the President to say fertilizers? ”
The First Lady replied, “It took me 25 years to get him to say ‘manure’.”
…
Well today I will try to give you as straight a reckoning as I can about the economic crises we have slipped into and what we can do about it, even here on the local level.
I am going to surprise everyone- I think- by not giving you the usual, garden variety Democratic line about corporate greed.
I may even further surprise you by saying, I don’t think greed got us here. And I’ll go even further by offering the idea that the Founding Fathers, were they here now, would agree that greed is not the problem.
The Founding Fathers were students of human events. And what they learned is that man’s basic nature is unchanging- at any given time- take any period of history you would like- there are about the same ratios of sinners and saints- and more accurately- the individuals running about had within each of the same bad and good habits.
This is why our republic and our constitution are such successes- because they don’t expect people to be perfect anymore then they expect them to be completely imperfect. People who expect perfection end up getting pretty disappointed in their fellow men and end up being cynical, and that’s the road that leads to despotism.
Instead basic liberties were guaranteed, and a government was erected, powerful enough to protect those freedoms, but not so strong that it smothered liberty. And they set up many checks and balances, because they knew that man- half sinner, half saint, cannot just be ruled by whim, but by a thoughtful process that drains passion and builds reason.
Both great political parties flow fiercely from that tradition and mind-set, and each in their own way claims, like quarreling brothers, their claim of their Founding Father’s estate. The Republicans claim they speak for the idea of limits, while the Democrats claim that part of the same tradition that saw the creation of strong federal government, replacing the original weak confederation, and a strong national direction of building canals, linking the colonies in the east to new territories in the west, and even creating the world’s first planned city:
Washington DC.

A legacy that binds that time to ours was their decision, under President Washington, to take the advice of Alexander Hamilton, and create a national debt from all the debts each state had from the War of Independence. By the time America celebrated her bi-centennial we had long since replaced England as the world center of money, and it is still even today our currency that all things are measured by or in. What they began has been carefully built up over the generations since.
Now here, my Republican friends and I will part ways. They believe that markets occur in nature and that government has nothing to do with them. But the reality is that strong markets and coherent government are co-necessities for capitalism. Capitalism, a system where a person with some money he has saved and wants to invest, needs to know he can invest safely. He needs to know that, for example, he is protected from fraud, that there are procedures for running a business, that there is good order in the society around, and that the business he invests in has things available: things such as cheap and available electricity, lots of well educated people, lots of good roads and other connections to markets, lots of safety so his products aren’t damaged, and so on.
Cheap power did not happen by accident but immense public investment. Universal literacy, and much more, did not occur by free market.
No investor would have built the interstate highway system and only immense investment in defense sciences brought the big breakthroughs in aviation that made flight affordable for people or freight.
The idea that it is government vs. markets is just a false choice.
It is, in fact, government, reasonable limited government that nevertheless can come in with huge long term investments that make markets. Easily over one half of the jobs and a majority of the growth in this County since 1981 occurred when the government put in the Glen Jackson Bridge creating the I-205 corridor- and free market took to right from there. On a big scale, the space program created many of the technologies that later created a huge technology free market.
This Democrat confesses that Al Gore did not invent the Internet- but I would point out that the Internet that now drives the free market …
began as public works project.

The Wall Street- WaMu Panic of 2008 is identical to the Dutch Tulip Panic of 1637- and folks, people have not changed so much in the 371 years in between. They had futures contracts, short selling, margin buying, extravagant lending, exotic forms of credit, a surge in investor values, followed by a big panic and at the end of day a big crash, with tulip prices falling back to where they had been before the frenzy, but having caused an economic recession. This would be the first of almost seventy five such crashes that we would have over the next 20 generations of free markets.
Now- They did have one thing that we do not- they actually traded even while bubonic plague threatened. This morning, when I checked our markets in New York remain plague free. Makes you wonder just how far today’s traders would go.
But there was SOME progress made seventy years ago.
We can debate endlessly over whether or not FDR was able to solve the Depression but there is not debate that the New Deal reforms and regulation saved America from another panic for over seventy years.
The New Deal was exactly that- a new deal- a new way of doing business. We still would have after FDR’s New Deal- GM, Ford and Chrysler and ABC, NBC and CBS, and General Mills and General Electric. But rules were put in that would prevent another crash. Big lines between banks and brokerages were established. Guarantees on people’s bank deposits were created. Clear understanding of what savings are insured and what are not were defined. Rules on trading, reporting, and so on were established.
Rules do not abolish capital but to protect it- to keep is from these panics which threaten capital and capitalism.
Strip away the rules- and human nature being constant, and we have a crash that was predictable as much as it follows the historic pattern
And there were the social reforms in the New Deal.
A decent minimum wage.
Employer provided health care encouraged.
After the War- a huge leap in public funding for schooling including college.
And yes- allowing people- if conditions were rotten enough- to form a union and bargain- not to bring down the company- but to bring up wages.
And the jewel in the New Deal crown: Social Security- guaranteed income no matter what’s going on- which I am guessing our Republican friends will not be wanting to privatize anytime soon.
An economy built from the bottom up, instead of the top down: this is the core of the New Deal. In simple terms – if people have economic security, then capital is made safe. If people get to share in the prosperity their own labor is creating, then capital is made prosperous- and prosperity is sustainable.
And so at the local level, making sure our stat has higher than national standards for doing business here, for banking here, for running an insurance company here, or for treating working people here. Those higher standards, combined with direct government work on education, roads, and so on – just like the building of the I-205 corridor creating a 26 year boom- these are the things that give this state a higher standard of living then most of the other forty nine states.
And veteran’s benefits- something I have worked personally on and for- is another basic example. It’s the right thing to do, it a sacred obligation- and it is also the right thing to do in making us a stronger state too.
So my plea to you today is this: this storm will past, but what will we learn? I say we need to re-learn what our veterans from the two world wars might have said in the first place from direct experience. Keep Wall Street on a short leash and if you have money to spend, save it- and what’s left over spend on the least well off, not the most.
I began by reporting that President Truman apparently spent twenty-five years learning how to say manure, but he did have some words of wisdom on unity too.
Asked about what he thought of the differences between this church and that he said, “Well, they’re all headed in a good direction”.
My hope for our Nation is that so will we.

God bless you and thank you for your service.