lessons from history
This is a brilliant article from The American Conservative Union Foundation. America is at a crossroads here at the beginning of the 21st Century. The decisions that "we the people" make over the next 10 years will determine if we will continue to be the "shining city on a hill" that Pres. Reagan talked about so much, or if we will slide into the cesspool of secularism and economic turmoil that Europe resides in. We shall see. When you finish this article, take a look at www.conservative.org/pressroom/thisweek/070112kb.htm for an outstanding article that discusses the need for new leaders to step up in the conservative movement. Enjoy!
Reagan Shows the Way--by Donald Devine
Two months after the disastrous 2006 election and the Republicans are still in shock. They still cannot believe they will not set the agenda in Congress or that they are facing a potentially greater defeat in 2008 that will lead to the loss of the executive branch as well. Even Democrats find it hard to believe and have no response themselves other than resurrecting 100 days of 70 year old programs as their “New Direction for America.”
Throughout the developed world public officials are facing the same dilemma. Politicians have promised democratic electorates the moon and cannot pay for it. Even the European socialists recognize the looming danger and, in fact, have generally faced the problems more directly than the more conservative parties. Indeed, with no credibility on welfare, the right tends to make the problem worse by spending more to show they care, to a staggering degree in the U.S.’s budget-busting Medicare drug program. So neither side can act to save its peoples’ from bankruptcy, which is made worse by the failure in every ethnic European population to produce more children to help pay the bills.
Where can forward-looking citizens and politicians look in this period of mass irresponsibility? Paradoxically, they only can look back, way back. It is now reasonably clear that the 1930s New Deal welfare state has broken down. Everywhere it is in bankruptcy, worse in Europe but with the U.S. not far behind as its entitlement iceberg looms over the ship of state $60 trillion high. Even assuming Moody’s high-end growth estimate of 2.5%, the economy will only grow to $24 trillion in 2035 to pay it. The solution to cut benefits or to increase “contributions” is politically, and in the case of the high taxes required economically, impossible.
How did this happen? The simple answer is that a political movement planned it. It had its roots in Bismarck’s late 19th Century Germany, which developed the welfare state as a means to avoid pure socialism. It shed its authoritarian tinge through the work of English “positive government liberals” like T.H. Green who justified the concentration of power required to redistribute welfare as necessary to help the people. These ideas were taken to the United States by self identified progressives like Woodrow Wilson who agreed that power was too separated in the American government and needed to be concentrated to positively promote the peoples’ welfare. His presidency began the transformation that coalesced in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and climaxed in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Over time, the spending became popular and so simply grew and grew, ultimately becoming and even officially labeled “uncontrollable.”
This was not an unprecedented situation in American history. The Federalist Founders faced a similar economic and political crisis that led them to the Constitution. Under the preceding government the states were the only real center of activity. The Congress of the Articles of Confederation basically could only act by unanimous consent. Each state had a very democratic form of government that bowed to the will of the majority and satisfied every wish. In due course, the states plied up more debt than they could convince the people to pay or to decrease obligations. It was this inability to make decisions that led to the creation of the new Constitutional government with shared national and state powers. While some power was centralized, 90 percent of government spending remained local rather than state or national into the early 20th Century when the progressives overrode the separations and consolidated power in the national government, planting the seeds of bankruptcy.
Interestingly, the best critique of what had gone wrong and what was necessary for its solution came from a politician, as were the Founders themselves, indeed a former president, again as were several founders. It is fitting that the one who best understood the problems the progressive revolution wrought under one president was one himself—and even shared part of the wayward president’s name, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Ronald Reagan’s critique started with the Federalist Founders. “Father of the Constitution” James
Madison knew and we should always remember that no government is perfect, not even a democracy. Rights given to government were taken from the people, and so he believed that government's touch in our lives should be light, that powers entrusted to it be administered by temporary guardians. He wrote that "government was the greatest of all reflections on human nature.'' He wrote that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government,'' he said, "which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and next oblige it to control itself.''
Led by Madison and Jefferson and others, the authors of the Constitution established a fragile balance between the branches and levels of government. That concept was their genius and the secret of our success -- that idea of federalism. The balance of power intended in the Constitution is the guarantor of the greatest measure of individual freedom any people have ever known. Our task today, this year, this decade, must be to reaffirm those ideas. Our Founding Fathers designed a system of government that was unique in all the world—a federation of sovereign states with as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level. They knew that man's very need for government meant no government should function unchecked.
We the people—and that is still the most powerful phrase— created government for our own convenience. It can have no power except that voluntarily granted to it by the people. We founded our society on the belief that the rights of men were ours by grace of God. That vision of our Founding Fathers revolutionized the world. Those principles must be reaffirmed by every generation of Americans, for freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
Few have so profoundly, so eloquently and so parsimoniously summed the thought of America’s Founders and why their creation in its diversity was the secret of its success. The progressives error was to centralize power and let the experts decide, opening the spigots to financial ruin. As president, his solution at the practical level was to cut budgets but for a deeper reason than saving money.
We're not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the States and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government. We can make government again responsive to the people by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly.
The problem is that the people think they want what the welfare state promises but they are wise enough not to give the government experts the power and resources needed to carry them out. That is precisely where America is today. At bottom, there are only two resolutions—either give much greater control to the experts over the peoples’ welfare as the progressives desire, and as Hillary Clinton attempted through her socialized health plan, and then increase taxes by 50 percent or more, which would be catastrophic--or return to the idea that centralized solutions do not work and let people and communities solve them.
Federalism--in its broadest sense of many free centers of power solving problems in multiple ways--was the solution that produced America’s success. No solution that does not take power from the national “experts” and return it to private and local citizens will allow that success to continue. Ronald Reagan proved it by the fact he brought the U.S. from double-digit inflation, 20 percent mortgage interest rates and economic stagflation to a recovery that has lasted essentially to this very day. From a Dow-Jones Industrial Average of 800 it grew to over 12,000 today with 40 million net new jobs while European employment has stagnated. The only reverses were between 1990 and 1994 when those policies were mitigated by increasing marginal income taxes to 35 percent, although no one proposes the 70 percent rate and stagflation Reagan ended. Unleashing private and local creativity is the way out.
The Medicare and Social Security Trustees demonstrate the red ink for entitlements begins exploding by the year 2016. The old New Deal vision of the free lunch is dead. Giving more power to government experts to solve the very problems they created has no constituency. People rightly do not trust them. Only by returning power to communities, private associations and individuals will sufficient creativity, energy and responsibility be unleashed to deal with the momentous problems ahead. It still will be difficult but the Founders and Ronald Reagan can at least show the way.
Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.
© 2007 American Conservative Union Foundation 1007 Cameron Street, Alexandria, VA 22314 Tel: 703.836.8602
Reagan Shows the Way--by Donald Devine
Two months after the disastrous 2006 election and the Republicans are still in shock. They still cannot believe they will not set the agenda in Congress or that they are facing a potentially greater defeat in 2008 that will lead to the loss of the executive branch as well. Even Democrats find it hard to believe and have no response themselves other than resurrecting 100 days of 70 year old programs as their “New Direction for America.”
Throughout the developed world public officials are facing the same dilemma. Politicians have promised democratic electorates the moon and cannot pay for it. Even the European socialists recognize the looming danger and, in fact, have generally faced the problems more directly than the more conservative parties. Indeed, with no credibility on welfare, the right tends to make the problem worse by spending more to show they care, to a staggering degree in the U.S.’s budget-busting Medicare drug program. So neither side can act to save its peoples’ from bankruptcy, which is made worse by the failure in every ethnic European population to produce more children to help pay the bills.
Where can forward-looking citizens and politicians look in this period of mass irresponsibility? Paradoxically, they only can look back, way back. It is now reasonably clear that the 1930s New Deal welfare state has broken down. Everywhere it is in bankruptcy, worse in Europe but with the U.S. not far behind as its entitlement iceberg looms over the ship of state $60 trillion high. Even assuming Moody’s high-end growth estimate of 2.5%, the economy will only grow to $24 trillion in 2035 to pay it. The solution to cut benefits or to increase “contributions” is politically, and in the case of the high taxes required economically, impossible.
How did this happen? The simple answer is that a political movement planned it. It had its roots in Bismarck’s late 19th Century Germany, which developed the welfare state as a means to avoid pure socialism. It shed its authoritarian tinge through the work of English “positive government liberals” like T.H. Green who justified the concentration of power required to redistribute welfare as necessary to help the people. These ideas were taken to the United States by self identified progressives like Woodrow Wilson who agreed that power was too separated in the American government and needed to be concentrated to positively promote the peoples’ welfare. His presidency began the transformation that coalesced in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and climaxed in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Over time, the spending became popular and so simply grew and grew, ultimately becoming and even officially labeled “uncontrollable.”
This was not an unprecedented situation in American history. The Federalist Founders faced a similar economic and political crisis that led them to the Constitution. Under the preceding government the states were the only real center of activity. The Congress of the Articles of Confederation basically could only act by unanimous consent. Each state had a very democratic form of government that bowed to the will of the majority and satisfied every wish. In due course, the states plied up more debt than they could convince the people to pay or to decrease obligations. It was this inability to make decisions that led to the creation of the new Constitutional government with shared national and state powers. While some power was centralized, 90 percent of government spending remained local rather than state or national into the early 20th Century when the progressives overrode the separations and consolidated power in the national government, planting the seeds of bankruptcy.
Interestingly, the best critique of what had gone wrong and what was necessary for its solution came from a politician, as were the Founders themselves, indeed a former president, again as were several founders. It is fitting that the one who best understood the problems the progressive revolution wrought under one president was one himself—and even shared part of the wayward president’s name, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Ronald Reagan’s critique started with the Federalist Founders. “Father of the Constitution” James
Madison knew and we should always remember that no government is perfect, not even a democracy. Rights given to government were taken from the people, and so he believed that government's touch in our lives should be light, that powers entrusted to it be administered by temporary guardians. He wrote that "government was the greatest of all reflections on human nature.'' He wrote that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government,'' he said, "which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and next oblige it to control itself.''
Led by Madison and Jefferson and others, the authors of the Constitution established a fragile balance between the branches and levels of government. That concept was their genius and the secret of our success -- that idea of federalism. The balance of power intended in the Constitution is the guarantor of the greatest measure of individual freedom any people have ever known. Our task today, this year, this decade, must be to reaffirm those ideas. Our Founding Fathers designed a system of government that was unique in all the world—a federation of sovereign states with as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level. They knew that man's very need for government meant no government should function unchecked.
We the people—and that is still the most powerful phrase— created government for our own convenience. It can have no power except that voluntarily granted to it by the people. We founded our society on the belief that the rights of men were ours by grace of God. That vision of our Founding Fathers revolutionized the world. Those principles must be reaffirmed by every generation of Americans, for freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
Few have so profoundly, so eloquently and so parsimoniously summed the thought of America’s Founders and why their creation in its diversity was the secret of its success. The progressives error was to centralize power and let the experts decide, opening the spigots to financial ruin. As president, his solution at the practical level was to cut budgets but for a deeper reason than saving money.
We're not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the States and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government. We can make government again responsive to the people by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly.
The problem is that the people think they want what the welfare state promises but they are wise enough not to give the government experts the power and resources needed to carry them out. That is precisely where America is today. At bottom, there are only two resolutions—either give much greater control to the experts over the peoples’ welfare as the progressives desire, and as Hillary Clinton attempted through her socialized health plan, and then increase taxes by 50 percent or more, which would be catastrophic--or return to the idea that centralized solutions do not work and let people and communities solve them.
Federalism--in its broadest sense of many free centers of power solving problems in multiple ways--was the solution that produced America’s success. No solution that does not take power from the national “experts” and return it to private and local citizens will allow that success to continue. Ronald Reagan proved it by the fact he brought the U.S. from double-digit inflation, 20 percent mortgage interest rates and economic stagflation to a recovery that has lasted essentially to this very day. From a Dow-Jones Industrial Average of 800 it grew to over 12,000 today with 40 million net new jobs while European employment has stagnated. The only reverses were between 1990 and 1994 when those policies were mitigated by increasing marginal income taxes to 35 percent, although no one proposes the 70 percent rate and stagflation Reagan ended. Unleashing private and local creativity is the way out.
The Medicare and Social Security Trustees demonstrate the red ink for entitlements begins exploding by the year 2016. The old New Deal vision of the free lunch is dead. Giving more power to government experts to solve the very problems they created has no constituency. People rightly do not trust them. Only by returning power to communities, private associations and individuals will sufficient creativity, energy and responsibility be unleashed to deal with the momentous problems ahead. It still will be difficult but the Founders and Ronald Reagan can at least show the way.
Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.
© 2007 American Conservative Union Foundation 1007 Cameron Street, Alexandria, VA 22314 Tel: 703.836.8602
posted by hondo at 9:57 PM
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