How Can We Expect to Get the Right Answers if We Fail to Ask the Right Questions?

7 Critical Questions for 21st Century Americans

In order to reveal the right answers to our current economic dilemma, Americans must first step outside their conventional 20th century boxes and be willing to ask the right questions. In that light I’d like to contribute the following 7 questions in an effort to initiate discussion, and to see what kinds of 21st century answers they might inspire.

1. Do we Americans really want a democratic government of the people, by the people, and for the people? In other words, do we really want to take the responsibility for governing ourselves, or do we prefer to subcontract that responsibility out to others who will gladly tell us what to do?

2. And if we really want that kind of freedom and responsibility, are we willing to dedicate ourselves to all that’s required day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and generation after generation in order to earn that kind of fully human opportunity?

3. If we answer these first two questions in the affirmative, then how can we systematically democratize the free market economy without resorting to heavy handed government, socialistic leaning regulations that tend to undermine individual initiative, creativity, and innovation? To my mind, this is the 64 trillion dollar question of the 21st century.

4. Along the same lines, how can we systematically democratize the modern, top down, hierarchical, autocratically oriented corporation within whose walls most Americans spend the highest percentage of their productive lives?

5. How can we systematically get ownership/management and labor working on the same side, pulling in the same direction, at the same time, towards the same ends, working in harmony, instead of constantly at odds with each other? Miraculous things could occur under such a synergistic scenario.

6. How can we systematically shrink the cancerous wealth gap that threatens any precarious experiment in democracy, and realistically address poverty in America and the world without government mandated, cyclical redistributions of wealth?

7. How can we have a legitimate democratic political system without a democratized economy? In other words, when wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few at the expense of the many, what’s to stop the rich and powerful from buying up, owning, and operating the American government, and running it to suit their own self serving ends?

Rick Osbourne
Osbourne.rick@gmail.com