Years ago, I saw long rows of softwood logs stacked along Commercial Street in Portland, awaiting shipment to China, where they would be turned into products that might well be shipped back to the United States.

Why, I asked myself, can’t we make those things from that wood right here? What are we, a Third-World country?

The answer, slowly arrived at, was yes. We are becoming or maybe we have become a Third-World country. But, we are Third World in a sense much broader than just selling basic commodities to other countries for their people to turn into value-added products.

A clarification. When the term Third World came into use just after World War II, the First World was the western democracies, the Second was the communist bloc, the Third was everyone else — by and large, poor countries. In time, Third World came to mean not just economically underdeveloped but also politically and socially, too.

On the economic side, those logs symbolized our shift from manufacturing to raw commodities. For a century, softwood in Maine meant paper (further-processed product) and lumber (partly processed). As the paper industry has declined, softwood has come to mean raw material for someone else to process. It has happened with farm products, too.

But economics is only the tip of the iceberg.

The late Rushworth Kidder, founder of the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, didn’t have First World versus Third World in mind when he said there are four great ethical dilemmas, but he gave us a way to view our slide. The four ethical dilemmas are truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, short-term versus long-term and justice versus mercy.

Let’s look at truth versus loyalty. It’s easy to imagine an underdeveloped country in which loyalty to a tin-horn gets one farther than hewing to the truth. Remember “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? Only a child, too young to profess loyalty to an emperor marching naked down the street, was able to say, “But, the emperor has no clothes.”

When loyalty tops truth, we enter the Third World. Did we see not a case of loyalty trumping truth on Wednesday when Republicans stripped Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, of her House leadership job? Her sin was telling the truth about the former guy.

Or, take individual versus community. It’s easy to imagine an underdeveloped country in which leaders focus on immediate wants and don’t build infrastructure (communications, transportation, skilled workforces and the like), which would make it easier for everyone to take care of herself. Can you say the Me Generation?

The American Society of Civil Engineers calculated in 2014 that America was $3.6 trillion behind in building and maintaining infrastructure. Even if President Biden’s entire infrastructure bill passed Congress, we would make up barely half of that deficit, which has grown since 2014. But we lead the world in consumer spending.

Let’s take short-term versus long-term. It’s easy to imagine an underdeveloped country in which a parade today takes priority over stringing electricity wires later to a rural village.

Starting perhaps with Milton Friedman, the champion of only-the-shareholders-matter economics, corporations have looked almost entirely to the short term. How much profit can we make in the next 90 days? And don’t worry about reinvesting in the company. We need big and rich profits for our shareholders, who include our board and management.

Dun & Bradstreet, which knows a bit about corporate operations, says the share of operating income spent for dividends and stock buybacks rose between 1999 and 2019 to 69% from 47%. The share spent for research and capital expense fell to 37% from 40%.

Finally, justice versus mercy. It’s easy to imagine an underdeveloped country in which jails are full and offenses are numerous and often victimless. For example, in Singapore, you can go to jail for spitting chewing gum out beside the road. Singapore’s incarceration rate was 201 per 100,000 residents, the Prison Policy Initiative rankings reported for 2018.

You likely know that the United States leads the world in imprisonment. We have 698 people in jail for every 100,000 residents. Rounding out the top seven: El Salvador (614), Turkmenistan (583), Cuba (510),Thailand (483), Rwanda (434) and Russia (413).

Vermont (328) ranks higher than Belarus (314). Maine ranks fourth lowest in America (363) but still jails more people than Nicaragua (238) and Honduras (208). To boot, nearly half a million unconvicted are in jail. They have been arrested but can’t make bail.

About one-fourth of the imprisoned are locked up for the victimless crime of drug possession. In 2018, states spent nearly $61 billion on prisons. Imagine how many bridges we could build with one fourth of that money.

Bob Neal studied political development, or how Third-World countries can come to be more like us. Little did he or his professors suspect we would come to be more like them. Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.

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