To Save America Page 3

  Abraham Lincoln’s life was marked by this same sense of simple honesty, which obliged him once to walk miles to return a few cents to an overpaying customer. Furthermore, as a young man he voluntarily took on the massive debt that his unscrupulous business partner left behind when the partner skipped town. It took Lincoln years to pay it off, but he earned a growing reputation as “Honest Abe,” a name that resonated with a population that valued honesty, self-sufficiency, and clean government.

  Americans traditionally have believed corruption favors the privileged few at the expense of the many. The rule of law, in contrast, favors the average person because it means everyone—rich and poor alike—has the same opportunity.

  Thus, the Wright brothers in their bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio, could believe they had as good a chance to invent the airplane as the top researchers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

  Henry Ford, working for Detroit Edison Electric Company and building his first car in his garage at night, could believe he had as good a chance to invent the mass-produced automobile as the most powerful person in the country.

  But today, an un-American tolerance for corruption has spread throughout government. When Henry Paulson, a Secretary of the Treasury who had been Chairman of Goldman Sachs, pushed through a bailout that placed $13 billion of taxpayer money in the hands of Goldman Sachs, Americans knew something was wrong.

  When a mortgage company gave Senator Chris Dodd a sweetheart deal for a home mortgage while the committee he was chairing had oversight of that company, Americans knew something was wrong.

  When fellow congressmen tried to protect William Jefferson after police found $90,000 in cash hidden in his freezer, Americans knew something was wrong.8

  The scale of corruption at every level of American government—from local city and county officials, to state officials such as former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, to members of Congress—now rivals that found in some of the worst governments around the world.

  There are three forms of this corruption. First, there is the “gaming the system” mentality outlined above. It’s exemplified, for example, by Americans willing to lie to get workmen’s comp or disability pay, or to take money while doing no work.

  Second, there is the natural corruption of big government. As Jefferson and other Founders argued, big government is inherently corrupt. Markets are ultimately fair because they empower individual consumers to make their own choices. Bureaucracies, in contrast, are fundamentally unfair because they empower a few insiders who inevitably drift toward cronyism and corruption. The only solution for big-government corruption is smaller government—any other solution is self-deception. As Lord Acton warned, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Third, there is the corruption of the secular-socialist machine, which knows if it competed fairly in the political system it would be crushed by the vast majority of Americans who oppose its values. Thus, out of necessity, left-wing politicians routinely encourage vote theft, lie about their policies, and defame their opponents.

  The secular-socialist machine relies on corruption for its very existence. It has to coerce money from union members who oppose its political policies; it has to rig the laws to enrich its trial lawyer allies; it has to cut special deals with big, rich corporations. Otherwise, the secular socialists would have no money. And that’s why they fight tooth and nail against attempts to clean up corruption.

  An America marked by limited government, honest politicians, and a small bureaucracy, and which focuses on fairness and the rule of law for every small business, every entrepreneur, every worker, and every retiree, is inherently a conservative, decentralized, individualistic America. It is the antithesis of a secular-socialist America dominated by political machines of big government, huge bureaucracies, and powerful politicians.

  5. Low Taxes with Limited Government Versus High Taxes with Big Government

  Americans have historically favored higher take home pay and lower taxes—we believe we could do a better job spending the money we earn than bureaucrats could. And unlike proponents of European-style socialist welfare states, we’re willing to forego many government services in favor of lower taxes.

  Paul Johnson caught the American tradition perfectly when he wrote in his classic book, A History of the American People, that in 1770 Americans were one of the lowest taxed people in history—and they resented every penny of it.

  Americans historically came to this continent to escape from intrusive, expensive, overbearing European governments. They created an American model (stated quite explicitly by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson) comprising small government, low taxes, and enormous incentives for hard work. They believed highly-motivated Americans would invent new products, establish new companies, steadily raise the standard of living, give to charity, and do it all better than any government-dominated, high-tax system could.

  For two hundred years that model has made America the envy of the world in income, productivity, innovation, and the overall standard of living. But a different approach is now undermining and crowding out that model.

  Since 1932 we have gradually built a new system of too much government with too many bureaucrats taking too much of our money to decide too many things for us and impose too many things upon us. And the growth of government has empowered enormous interest groups of bureaucrats and their clients who fight ferociously to sustain a high-tax, big-bureaucracy system. Developing specific proposals to replace this system with our traditional low-tax, small-government model will be one of the greatest intellectual and entrepreneurial challenges of the next decade.

  We have already made some progress, however, such as the gradual replacement of bureaucratic state schools by charter schools. A Pell grant system for K through 12 would be an even bolder model. Another positive trend is the replacement of defined benefit retirement plans with retirement systems based on defined contributions and 401k plans. The spread of Health Savings Accounts that increase transparency and empower individuals to make informed choices is another good trend.

  The Left, unsurprisingly, have opposed every one of these reforms toward more personal freedom, more personal control, more personal empowerment, and more personal responsibility.

  6. Private Property Versus Government Controls

  Early Americans passionately believed in private property rights. In fact, Jefferson originally wrote property rights into the Declaration of Independence where the right to “the pursuit of happiness” now appears.

  For early Americans, freedom was inextricably linked to property rights. If the government could take your property, confiscate your wealth, define what you could do with your own land, money, or goods, and even quarter troops in your home, then clearly you were not free but a mere subject of the state.

  Thus, the Founding Fathers counted private property among the unalienable rights endowed by our Creator. They wrote the Constitution in part to protect private property rights (including the value of money and the sanctity of debt) from the mob (meaning popular demagoguery) and the mob’s government.

  Rejecting the sanctity of private property, the secular-socialist model has no problem with a city council or Washington bureaucrat taking your property and giving it to someone else. It has presided over a steady decline in private property rights over the last generation, highlighted by the tragic Kelo vs. City of New London case, in which the Supreme Court unconscionably ruled that private property can be confiscated from individuals and given to private developers if, in the judgment of local, state, or federal bureaucrats, doing so would aid economic growth and raise tax revenues.

  Reasserting private property rights will be deeply resisted by every local and federal bureaucrat and every judge who likes having the power to use your property to enrich someone else. And it will be opposed by every environmental group eager to tell you what you can and cannot do with your own property.

  7. Localism Versus Washington Con
trol

  There has been an enormous transfer of power from local and state governments to the Washington bureaucracies. Historically, Americans largely governed themselves. Local people mostly governed their affairs in their own communities, while states enjoyed immense freedom from the federal government. Likewise, local school boards had real power, and city councils and county commissions used their own community resources to solve problems. Washington was a distant place that had relatively little day-to-day impact on the average citizen. And that is the way our government was devised, with the Tenth Amendment decreeing that all power not specifically assigned to the federal government should reside in the states.

  This intense localism led to an extraordinarily dense system of local elections that we still have today, even if the elected representatives have lost much of their power to the federal bureaucracy. There are more than 513,000 elected local, state, and federal officials in the United States, only 537 of whom are federal, or about one-tenth of one percent. In other words, 99.9 percent of all elected officials are at the local and state level.

  With one in 600 Americans holding elected office at any one time, and when you consider these offices have routine turnover, it’s likely that one out of every hundred Americans holds an elected office during their lifetime. This creates a common understanding of the give and take of public life, of collective decision making and of the responsibility of citizenship.

  While local citizens can hold their local elected officials accountable at the next election, U.S. senators may represent so many million people that they don’t even have the resources to respond to all their constituents’ letters and phone calls, much less know them all personally. This situation creates an outsized influence for powerful interest groups and insiders, and a debilitating remoteness for average citizens.

  A decentralized system of local power empowers local people who are most familiar with the complexities of their own communities. Today’s big-government system, however, assumes bureaucrats in Washington who have never been to your town so profoundly understand the principles of good government that they should make decisions your mayor, city council, county commission, or school board cannot be trusted to make.

  I often tell audiences to imagine their local mayor has a cousin in the Washington bureaucracy. According to the secular-socialist model, the cousin in Washington knows better than the mayor what’s right for the local community. Now imagine that the mayor swaps jobs with his cousin. As the mayor drives toward Washington, his IQ goes up. Meanwhile the IQ of his cousin, as he drives home from Washington, drops with every passing mile. By the time the former mayor reaches Washington and takes on his new bureaucratic job, he has grown smart enough to issue orders to his cousin, the new mayor, who has grown dumb enough that he needs instructions from Washington to solve the problems of his local community.

  This story shows how the principles of the current Washington-centric system are simply, irredeemably wrong.

  Craig Shirley, the great biographer of Ronald Reagan, draws another analogy: megabanks versus microlending in poor neighborhoods. Shirley notes that microlending efficiently gets small amounts of money to local entrepreneurs in poor countries. Microlending requires a very inexpensive process of understanding and analyzing the borrower, analyzing the project, making and implementing a decision to lend, and sometimes advising the recipients.

  Megabanks, which got into so much trouble during the Wall Street meltdown, could never successfully microlend. They’re too big and too bureaucratic to understand and analyze millions of small entrepreneurs, and they could never afford the cost of analyzing so many loan applications and processing checks.

  Now consider this: if big banks are too isolated and too bureaucratic to operate successfully in small, local settings, why would we think big, centralized government bureaucracies could do better?

  Shifting from centralized bureaucracy to localism is a crucial reform, though the secular-socialist machine will bitterly oppose it. The Left built these big bureaucracies precisely because they knew they could never win enough local elections to change the country. When localities are empowered, they prove time and again that conservative solutions work and left-wing solutions fail.

  Localism—returning power from Washington to state and local governments—will be one of the most important movements of the next decade. I frequently remind governors and state legislators they need to move power from their state capitol back to local communities just as energetically as they fight for power to return from Washington back to them.

  8. American Energy Versus Environmental Extremism

  There is no American energy shortage. And there is no reason America (and the world) should be vulnerable to energy blackmail by dictators from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia to Iran. What we have is a long-standing government policy to restrict our own energy production and to artificially inflate energy costs.

  Most Americans are shocked to find out just how extensive our energy resources really are.

  • We have a 500-year supply of coal, which will remain the lowest cost source of electricity in our lifetime barring a fantastic breakthrough in some other production method.

  • Our offshore oil reserves are big, though we don’t know exactly how big because the Left have prevented any geologic surveys from being conducted since 1984.

  • On land, it now seems we have more oil than we thought, with indications, for example, that the Bakken formation in North Dakota is three times as large as previously estimated.

  • We have three times more oil than Saudi Arabia if you count our shale oil deposits, and we have an astounding 1,100-year supply of natural gas that can now be tapped thanks to new technology.

  • We have the technology to produce virtually unlimited amounts of carbon-free electricity through nuclear power.

  Traditional America used all available energy to build the world’s richest economy. Science and technology led the process, constantly creating new, more efficient ways to extract resources and produce energy.

  Today, a traditional American approach would be to strive for energy independence through an “all of the above” policy that fully exploits our coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear resources, while also cultivating the next generation of energy technology: biofuels, wind, hydrogen, and solar power, as well as developing new conservation methods.

  Secular socialists have a different view. Through the misguided attempts of some to create an environmental utopia, and the cynical attempts of others to use our concern for the environment as a weapon against capitalism, they have restricted and regulated energy development so extensively that they have forced America, which should be an energy powerhouse, to become dependent on foreign oil, much of it from unstable or tyrannical regimes. Relentlessly demonizing energy companies, they tie up every new oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear project in years of frivolous litigation.

  The Left only allow development of alternative renewable energy like wind and solar that, while useful, will take generations to displace fossil fuels as our primary energy source. Until then, they are content for America to suffer shrinking energy supplies, rising prices, foreign dependence, and the loss of energy jobs.

  Imagine if, through the traditional American approach, we achieved energy independence by unleashing the full potential of our own energy supply. Imagine the economic effect of keeping $535 billion at home every year instead of sending it to foreign dictators for oil; that’s over $5 trillion a decade—more than a third of the entire national debt. Imagine if the next building boom were in St. Louis instead of Dubai, and if a new wave of jobs washed over America instead of foreign countries.

  What we see from the secular socialists today is not an energy strategy. Bowing to a Saudi king is not an energy strategy. Accepting gifts from Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is not an energy strategy.

  The challenge is not natural resources—America has plenty of those. The challenge is bad government imposing bad laws, bad regu
lations, and bad litigation.

  9. Conflict Resolution Versus Litigation

  To compete successfully with China and India, we must have litigation reform.

  To have an effective government, we must have litigation reform.

  To encourage young people to pursue medical careers, we must have litigation reform.

  If we want Americans to emphasize cooperation and problem solving over acrimonious, costly conflicts, we must have litigation reform.

  Most Americans agree there are too many lawyers filing too many lawsuits, especially in medicine. According to a Rasmussen poll from December 2009, 57 percent of Americans favor limiting the amount of money a jury can award a plaintiff in a medical malpractice lawsuit, while only 29 percent disagree.9

  As Wayne Oliver, leader of the Health Justice Project at the Center for Health Transformation, has noted, an estimated $151-210 billion is wasted annually in defensive medicine, as doctors follow unnecessary procedures and conduct needless tests and services solely to avoid malpractice lawsuits.

  In preparing for health reform in 2009, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that litigation reform in medical malpractice would save the federal government $53 billion over ten years. Yet, even though Obama, Pelosi, and Reid needed money to pay for their government health program; even though doctors made malpractice reform their number one reform goal; and even though a significant majority of the American people supported litigation reform, it was impossible for the Democrats to support it.

  For the Left, this isn’t about ideology; it’s about raw power. The simple fact is that trial lawyers are one of the primary components of the secular-socialist machine and major financiers of the Democratic Party. The lawyers understand their income directly depends on their ability to sue. And the Democrats will never cross such important supporters on such a crucial issue.