Leadership and Crisis (21 page)

Bad things can and do happen. We need to protect and help genuine victims of life’s misfortunes. The goal should be to give them a leg up—not a hand-out. In my experience, the real victims in our society often want to overcome the challenges in their lives—not wallow in them. As Thomas Sowell has put it, “Victimhood is something to escape, not something to exploit.”
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Yet, a modern-day Benjamin Franklin would cause a firestorm today if he once again said, “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
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Franklin, the father of bifocal eyeglasses, still saw America with 20/20 vision.

As soon as Obamacare passed, there were news reports of health insurance companies getting calls from people asking about their “free healthcare.” There used to be a stigma attached to seeking public assistance. If you have never seen the movie
Cinderella Man
, you need to. It’s the true story of champion boxer James J. Braddock, who when he was down on his luck during the Great Depression, with no heat and no food to feed his family, applied for public assistance. He received $24 a month from the Hudson County Relief Agency of New York. But when Braddock got back on his feet and back in the ring, he actually went back to the welfare office and paid every single penny of it back. Why? He didn’t have to. The government required no such thing, but his conscience required it.
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But American culture is changing. There used to be a stigma about being dependent on the government. Increasingly we have a culture of entitlement, where individuals feel they are owed and forget that government does not create the benefits it bestows. Government simply takes from us with one hand and gives with another, wasting a portion in the process.

All too often the sales pitch for bargaining away our freedoms for security comes from intellectuals and people in the elite who have an ill-disguised contempt (or little respect) for the American people. They operate with a basic premise: Americans are just not smart enough to govern themselves. This has been the cry of those who lust for power throughout history. Both fascism and communism were developed and created by intellectuals who believed people were too dumb to take care of themselves. Even the apartheid system in South Africa was laid out in detail by the social psychology department of Stellenbosch University with the claim that it would be beneficial for everyone: let us take care of you!
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Here in the United States the message is more subtle and less threatening. “Trust us to meet your needs. Trust government to guarantee your security.” It is a tempting and dangerous sales pitch. First, we know these intellectual elites can’t deliver the security they promise. Is there any problem in your life you would trust politicians and bureaucrats to tackle? Is Washington doing anything more efficiently or inexpensively? What problem has Washington fixed lately?

Never have so many smart people been out of touch with America’s problems. The “genius” of a few political leaders is no substitute for the combined wisdom of the American people. Those who would run our schools, businesses, and every aspect of our lives, often with the best of intentions, want us to believe that they can get together in Congress, write a few thousand pages of law, and simply right highly complex wrongs. They can make our problems evaporate! The truth is, of course, the increasingly complicated and interconnected nature of our lives in today’s fast-moving Age of Communications makes our problems much too complex for bureaucrats and politicians in far-away Washington to understand or even measure. They
don’t have the local understanding, innovative spirit, and adaptive ability that Americans have always used to meet this nation’s great challenges and create its unmatched progress and prosperity.

Take Social Security and Medicare. The 2009 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports show the combined unfunded liability of these two programs has reached nearly $107 trillion dollars.
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That is roughly seven times the size of the U.S. economy. When we get about halfway through this century, one third of the wages workers earn will be needed just to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits—that’s before we pay our teachers, provide for our national defense, fix a single pothole, or find a way to pay for Obamacare. One survey revealed that our young people were more likely to believe in UFOs than in the solvency of the Social Security system! I would have to agree with them, though politics has made me wish for the discovery of more intelligent life on other planets. Franklin D. Roosevelt designed the Social Security System to be funded by the Social Security Tax and not out of general funds. “No dole,” he said, “mustn’t have a dole.”
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He wanted the people getting it to pay for it. Our only chance of preserving these programs is to take action now.

We declared war on poverty more than forty years ago. We have spent trillions in fighting it. Yet the poverty rate today is basically unchanged. We’ve fought an expensive war on poverty and we are poorer as a nation than if we had never fired a shot. Yet many in Washington still feel the Land of the Free should become the Land of the Free Lunch.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in some safety nets. But safety nets can, and often do, create “moral hazards” when they encourage irresponsible behavior. It took the federal government decades to figure out that if welfare subsidizes out-of-wedlock births, you get more
out-of-wedlock births! And government programs that promise us “safety” are always oversold and cost more than estimated. In 1996 Congress passed a farm law expected to cost $47 billion. The final price tag: $118 billion. When Medicare Part A was passed in 1965, it was expected to cost $9 billion by 1990. It cost $67 billion that year. The entire Medicaid system, which was designed as a state-federal program for the poor, costs 37 times more than it did when it was launched—even after adjusting for inflation!
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If a private company offered to do something for you but failed to deliver in such an abysmal way, they would be sued for false advertising and fraud. When big government fails, all we get is, “Let’s go back to the drawing board and raise taxes.”

The problem with the intrusive power of old-fashioned, industrial-age government is not just that it doesn’t work. It also undermines who we are as Americans. Once we start to accept the premise that we can’t take care of ourselves, the basic thesis of self-government begins to erode, like sand dissolving under our feet. If we can’t take care of ourselves, how can we be expected to take care of the business of selfgovernance?

Western Europe is often presented as an idyllic model for utopian, collectivist schemes. If we could only be more like Europe, our problems would go away. Europe is evidence that we need a government-run healthcare system, a big-brother-controlled employment system, and an expansive social welfare state. But where is Europe today? The Euro always seems to be on the verge of collapsing, many countries have abrogated their economic sovereignty, and Europeans have far less control over their own futures than they did just two generations ago. In the European Union many of the rules are now being written, not by elected officials, but by
unelected bureaucrats
. If you don’t like
the rules, too bad. There is nowhere to go when those making the rules are not directly accountable to the people. Scholars call this the “administrative state,” when unelected bureaucrats become the real powerbrokers. I have another word for it: tyranny.

The move away from greater political freedom is the natural consequence of a paternalistic state. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the corrosive effects that paternalistic thinking would have on the American people. The government has a role to play in protecting us, he wrote, but its mindset should be that of the parent who seeks to prepare their children for adulthood. We should encourage
independence
from the government. But de Tocqueville warned that some would be tempted to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by promoting
dependence
on the government.
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The biggest push for the greater intrusion of government is in the area of economics and business. Some argue the government is supposed to “redistribute” the wealth, control businesses, and restrict the economic activities of people. Forget for a minute whether or not this is just. Restricting economic freedoms limits our political freedoms. History teaches that the two are intimately entwined. Economic freedom disperses political power and distributes it among the people. With a free market system we separate economic power from political power, so that each may offset the other. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman put it, “Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.”
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Economic independence is what allows people to protect their political rights and freedoms. Once the
powerful hand of government subsumes our economic independence, it immediately becomes more difficult to stand up to that government. The natural logic of capitalism requires democracy. Synchronously, if we over-restrict capitalism, our democratic logic is disrupted. Economic freedom and political freedom are indivisible. As President Gerald Ford said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”
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Too many people in Washington believe they can restrict our economic freedom without limiting our political liberties. They see the private sector as a threat, dangerous unless controlled. I was struck by the words President Barack Obama used in his memoir to describe his feelings on taking the only job in a private business he has ever held. Looking back on his brief stint at a financial consultancy, he says he felt “like a spy behind enemy lines.”
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Furthermore, he has surrounded himself with few people in Washington who have any experience in the private sector. Around 20 percent of his Cabinet appointments have private sector experience, far below any other recent president. For fellow Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, that figure was well over 30 percent.
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Private businesses are the enemy? Far from it. They not only create American wealth, they are critical to our political freedoms. The economic independence of each and every American, rich or poor, is at the heart of the American experiment in self-government.

Don’t get me wrong. Private businesses are plenty capable of doing the wrong thing. Wall Street has proven that. But the private sector lacks the coercive powers government wields. McDonald’s can’t force us to buy their hamburgers. Starbucks can’t force us to buy their coffee. Businesses can only be successful in a free market if they provide services or goods that people want. The more people want them, the more the business will sell.

Our Founding Fathers saw the Constitution as codifying pre-existing rights—not creating those rights. And they considered government to be the biggest threat to a people’s liberties. Were they correct? During the twentieth century, in peacetime, governments across the world killed some 170 million of their own people. (Thirty-eight million died in war.
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) We should all be concerned about the power of big business, but I’m far more concerned about the unchecked power of government.

A paternalistic government not only threatens our political independence, it also affects our character. Do I believe that we have a responsibility to others? Of course. Whenever possible, however, that responsibility should flow through our communities, not through government, especially at the federal level. It’s an amazing paradox, but there is considerable evidence that shows the more you believe the federal government should help other people, the less likely you are to help yourself or others. A few years ago, Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks wrote a book called
Who Really Cares
, which demonstrated that those who are skeptical of big government are actually more charitable. A paternalistic view of society leads to the conclusion that individuals can’t really change things, only government can. Professor James Lindgren of the Northwestern University School of Law also looked at research on charitable giving and discovered that “those who wanted the government to promote income leveling were less likely to be generous themselves.”
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What we need in America today is to trust
ourselves
—not look to others to take care of us. I have complete faith in the common sense and character of the American people. To paraphrase the late writer William F. Buckley, I would rather be led by the first one hundred names in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana phone book than the faculty of Harvard University. We need to remind ourselves that America is a
collection of individuals, brought together with a common outlook and heritage of freedom. That is what makes us great.

As the Nobel Laureate in economics F. A. Hayek put it, the “unchaining of individual energies” has given us prosperity, freedom, and liberty. Only individuals create and dream. Individuals have rights and responsibilities. As a society, we thrive when people take responsibility for themselves and those around them. We bloom when we allow individuals to work hard and enjoy what they can achieve.

At their most extreme, collectivists believe, “The individual is nothing in relation to the course [of time], the species is everything.” (Adolf Hitler said that.) As Americans who love the United States, however, we cannot ever allow our society to drift to the opposite extreme where, “The individual is everything. The group is nothing.” We have personal freedom, but we also have personal responsibilities, to both ourselves and those around us. In my family, our need to care for others, not just our families but strangers, too, springs from our Christian beliefs. The greatest commandment, which envelopes so many others, is the voluntary obligation to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Government coercion is a poor and dangerous substitute for that appeal to our better angels. As Winston Churchill said just over 100 years ago, the good Lord taught us to believe “all mine is yours,” not “all yours is mine.” Christian charity is about giving, not taking.