Rage Against the Political Machine

Let's put the issue in the crossfire. For the Cyber-Libertarians, meet Scott McNealy, the boyish, hockey-loving, 41-year-old chairman and CEO of the ferociously successful and innovative Sun Microsystems. The son of a Detroit automobile mogul, McNealy drifted through Harvard and Stanford Business School without apparent motivation before helping to found Sun in 1982; finally focused, he became CEO at 30. Today he's one of the industry's leaders. McNealy rejects out-of-hand the notion that the economy is undergoing a transformation that is breeding insecurity in the middle class. "What transformation?" he cries incredulously. "We've been going through a transformation ever since I learned to read. All the politicians are trying to do is generate votes through insecurity. That's all that's going on. This is as old as our society.

"Either your job is secure and you have a planned economy, or your job is insecure and you're in a free-enterprise economy," McNealy argues. "Or you're a tenured professor or a government official with no term limits."

Besides, McNealy asks, who says government's goal should be to diminish insecurity? "We've become a society of victims," he says. "If you don't have losers, you can't have winners. If you don't have winners, you can't move the standard of living forward. Insecurity is the source of all motivation. Why do I do my job? I don't need any more money. I'm insecure. I need to prove to myself and everybody around me that I can do it again tomorrow. We ought to take advantage of that basic element of human nature."

Here's where Mitchell Kertzman jumps into the debate from the Techno-Communitarian side. A Brandeis dropout who dabbled as a disk jockey, a folk singer, a booking agent, and a peddler of biorhythm charts, Kertzman finally found himself as a programmer. In 1974, he launched Powersoft Corp., which became a leader in client-server software; 20 years later, he sold the company to Sybase Inc., a leading database company, and became a multimillionaire.

Today he's the executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Sybase and is among the most politically engaged executives in the computer industry. In 1994, Kertzman was the principal business supporter of a Massachusetts ballot initiative to impose a progressive state income tax; he has since founded the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (or MassInc.), a think tank to explore issues relating to what he calls "the wealth gap between the wealthy and the rest of the middle class."

"I buy Scott's argument, which is the entrepreneurial argument," Kertzman says. "Scott, motivated by insecurity, can drive Sun even further. But it's self-fulfilling, self-circulating. Yes, if you have the college education and the background and you come from an intact family that motivated you to achieve, you can do that. But that doesn't seem to be a majority of the public. And public policy has to serve a majority of the public."

Kertzman isn't sure anyone knows "how we get at" the widening polarization of income documented most recently by a major Census Bureau study released in June. A strategy to upgrade skills through education and training, subsidize basic research, and open foreign markets for increased U.S. exports and high-wage jobs "is probably as good a set of answers as we have in all that we know," Kertzman says. "But is it enough? Probably not."

Kertzman has less doubt about the implications of allowing the centrifugal trends in earnings and wealth simply to continue into the next century. "I believe the extrapolation of where we're going is Mexico, some Caribbean island, or Brazil, where the very wealthy live behind guarded walls to protect themselves from the people who work for them," he says. "The public schools lose the support of that [affluent] class because those schools are for the poor kids, and all of the public institutions are basically there to keep order among the poor. I think it is terribly dangerous."