In Praise of Scrooge McDuck

Hallelujah, Glory Be! Finally after seventy years of relative peace and quiet someone is finally going to address this whole social security problem once and for all. I knew I could count on the Bush Administration to be good for something.

So, let me get this straight: there’s a plan for social security out there, it’s going to involve personal/private savings accounts, there are concerns about other issues that we’re not going to talk about right now (labor and Medicaid to name a couple) and no one really knows what the whole deal is. To say nothing of the current administration portraying itself as the canary in the social security mineshaft and trying to convince everyone that the cave-in is going to happen any minute now when in actuality there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Sounds like another day in paradise.

To be honest, the debate over social security reminds me a lot of a cartoon I saw as a kid. The cartoon featured Scrooge McDuck, the miserly old uncle of Donald Duck. In it, Scrooge decided to make a play to increase the fortune that he already had by doing something that we would now call diversifying: he decided to expand beyond the banking business into marketing. A fair plan, so say all of us. Here was the catch: he didn’t have anything to market. Uncle Scrooge had a brilliant idea to sell something to the people that he was sure everyone would buy because everyone would think they would need it. If only he actually knew what that something was.

Now, your average, modern-day entrepreneur would probably use this opportunity to take the pulse of the consuming nation. Our clever friend would conduct some kind of needs assessment, create a business plan and pitch ideas to as many Fortune 500 companies as would open the door. Or just lie back down on the couch, turn on the television and spend the next five years at social gatherings starting conversations with the phrase, “You know what that company should really do…”

Uncle Scrooge, however, is not the average modern-day entrepreneur. He has verve, business savvy and a disposable income that would make Donald Trump envious. Uncle Scrooge is also not daunted by his lack of an actual product. Being the good armchair sociologist that he apparently is, he understands something of human nature and what makes people do things. He understands that intrigue sells and that when in doubt, just smother your potential customers in advertising and you’re sure to pick up at least a few buyers. So Scrooge goes to work marketing his product, undaunted that there is no product to actually sell.

Scrooge hires a famous actress to appear in billboards, commercials and magazine ads talking about the great new product “Pepp”. Never does our photogenic actress actually mention what Pepp is or what it does. She merely attributes her financial successes, shining hair, active social life and personal triumphs to it. The ads are everywhere, blanketing the city with news about the newest wonder, Pepp.

The result of all this talking and advertising? Pepp is in demand everywhere. Stores are barraged with people wanting to know when Pepp will be arriving on the shelves. Neighbors ask neighbors about from whence such a wonderful thing as Pepp came to be. Consumers literally flock to stores (remember, this was a show about ducks) to pre-order this wonderful new miracle product.

Eventually, Scrooge releases Pepp and it turns out to be nothing incredible. People are disappointed, but life continues. Scrooge has made an initial foray into the world of marketing and has come back the better for it financially. In a move reminiscent of P.T. Barnum’s observation about suckers, Scrooge may be left with smoke and mirrors, but they are smoke and mirrors that people paid good money to see.

In the absence of an actual substantive thing to sell, Scrooge McDuck manages to sell nothing and to do it in a way that has the entire world around him buzzing. The greatest aspect to this plan is not that people were willing to buy something when they didn’t know what it was, but it was the extent to which a whole lot of hot air went into a big chunk of nothing.

I’m not suggesting that the current hoopla over social security is nothing. Quite the contrary, I think this is going to be a major issue. The reason we have social security is because we learned the hard way over eighty years ago that people generally don’t independently manage their own money that well. When they do, bad things happen and a whole lot of other people get left in the dust. (That dust being literal if you lived in Okalahoma, Texas, Kansas or any of those other Middle-American states in the 1930s and had to grow accustomed to sandstorms wiping out your entire farm.)

What I am suggesting is that the buzz over the social security plan only raises the level of hot air in the room. Of course, by writing all this I am arguably contributing to that hot air, but I suppose that’s the inevitable consequence of a guy with a sequence of thoughts in his head and some word processing software.