I have noticed recently that a fundamental economic principle, ROI (Return on Investment) is fast becoming the underpinning of our national political and legislative debate. Simply put: Anything that provides a good return on investment is a thing worth doing, anything that doesn't provide a good return is not.

That leads us to our first question - Good return for who?

In our post Citizen's United world the answer is obvious - "who" is the large corporate interests that fund the political campaigns and underwrite (and sometimes literally write) the legislation that follows. We are back to the days of "What's good for GM is good for America."

As it turns out, what is good for manufacturers does not turn out to be good for America, or at least the labor class in America. It may have been good for manufacturers to offshore and send production to China and Mexico, but it ultimately was not a good thing for the workers.

Which leads to a second question - "Is there any way to tie the advancement of individual human and/or societal interest to this advancement of moneyed interests?"

There is a way that these competing interests can be brought into alignment, or so we are told by our elected class. The way that they appeal to both the Haves and the Have Nots is to make a logical appeal based on the rock solid fiscal principal of ROI - do something because it makes financial sense.

I first noticed ROI being used as the bridge between business and the Rest of Us when I listened/read Hillary Clinton's speech Building the Growth and Fairness Economy at the New School last July. This speech was considered important because it was the unveiling of the guiding doctrines HRC would use in forging a new economic order during her Presidency. The speech offered a great view of the ROI principle at work.

Here is Hillary discussing WHY companies should pay their workers decent wages and train them and retain them:

I’m not talking about charity – I’m talking about clear-eyed capitalism. Many companies have prospered by improving wages and training their workers that then yield higher productivity, better service, and larger profits. “Now it’s easy to try to cut costs by holding down or decreasing pay and other investments to inflate quarterly stock prices, but I would argue that’s bad for business in the long run. “And, it’s really bad for our country. “Workers are assets. Investing in them pays off. Higher wages pay off. And training pays off.

I find this argument to be pragmatic in the extreme as it offered ONLY a businessperson's view as to why such actions were a good ROI for a company but she completely abandoned the argument that I personally find even more compelling, the moral imperative to pay workers fairly and to train and retain them because it is the right thing .

IMO that's important because there are many times when both companies and people are faced with quandaries that will not be answered by applying the "ROI" metric and where in fact the ROI metric will lead to the wrong and even morally reprehensible answer. We find example of the ROI metric failing us as a society when a company chooses to pollute (yes, some of them make the conscious choice to do so if they consider the cost of compliance too high) or when a company decides whether a patient gets lifesaving treatment based on how it impacts their bottom line.

Why were people directed to higher costs sub-prime mortgages when they qualified for better ? Because the businesses involved were using the ROI metric and not the old-fashioned metric of basic morality, decency and ethics. So I personally don't advocate the ROI metric as being the one that should rule our policy decisions as a county.

Going down this same line of reasoning of placing financial returns on functions of government has led us to the madness where some think policing needs to be a profit-making center for a municipality such as happened in Ferguson. Policing, the courts, the justice system,and prisons were never envisioned as money making enterprises, at least not until this pervasive and corruptive worldview took hold that no entity had intrinsic value in its service to society and that everything must either pay for itself or even turn a profit. The worldview that the overriding concern of the globe and the nation is the health and strength of corporations is one apparently shared by Hillary - business growth trumps everything else and all the other good things in the world will be a trailing positive effect.

The premise of ROI is subtle in it's influences on policies that you may not be quick to relate to it. Today I happened to read this article in Salon.

In this article we see that Hillary Clinton rejects the practice of torture because it is ineffective In other words, not a good ROI on returning to the Middle Ages, defying Geneva Conventions and subverting all concepts of humanity and decency. Author Dan Denvir is eloquent about the moral failings of Hillary's argument:

It’s true, torture is ineffective. But it’s horrible for Clinton to make that the heart of her criticism. Torture is a monstrously cruel violation of human rights that degrades the rule of law and sets new rock-bottom standards for the treatment of detainees worldwide—something that ISIS, placing its victims in Guantánamo orange jumpsuits, has eagerly mocked. While Clinton did note that “terrorists are trying to undermine the democratic values that are at the root of our way of life,” that’s pretty milquetoast given that she as recently as 2006 said that torture might be acceptable in “ticking time bomb” cases.

What’s more, Clinton making her argument against torture an essentially pragmatic and technocratic one cedes the moral ground to Trump. And it’s not just on torture. Referencing Trump’s call for stopping Muslim travel to the U.S., she responded that it’s “unrealistic to say we’re going to completely shut down our borders to everyone…That would stop commerce, for example, and that’s not in anybody’s interest.”

Stopping Muslim travel is not bad for reasons of bigotry or xenophobia or intolerance, it is wrong because it is a hindrance to commerce! Bad ROI, in other words.

In our new world of moral equivalency guided by capitalist imperatives I wonder if Moses himself wouldn't have been co-opted by the golden calf industry to keep them in the loop as the intermediaries of religious symbolism and to phase out golden calves over a period of years while they diversified.