The Genius of America

The Genius of America
The View from the Middle

Let me take this opportunity to encourage my readers, and especially young people, to read some history. We should all know and understand the underpinnings of our own country, but we should also read the facts about other systems of government and the people who launched them. We should read about Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. We should all know about Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro and even Adolf Hitler. I believe that if we read history, we will come to appreciate the genius of our Founding Fathers.

Our Founders understood the depravity of man (and woman) and designed governmental and economic systems that took power away from the government, controlled by a small group of men, and invested in the individual. Why would they do that? For two reasons. First, they had just left a monarchy where they believed that too much power rested in the hands of very few people. They understood the old adage that states, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” They also recognized the tendency of men to be greedy and selfish. As the Bible says in Jeremiah, “The heart (of man) is deceitful above all things, and beyond cure.” They never wanted our government, which will always be run by human beings, to wield the kind of monstrous power that they experienced in England.

They created a government that was intentionally small, running on revenues that represented two, three or four percent of the country’s GDP from 1790 all the way through the 1920’s. Of course, there were bursts of spending for the Civil War and for WWI, but outside of those existential threats, the government remained tiny for almost 140 years. They also added “The Bill of Rights” to our Constitution specifically to protect the rights of the individual from the cold, blunt, uncaring power of a central government. Today government spending equals 23% of our GDP and intrudes into almost every aspect of our lives. The Founders would be both disappointed and terrified.

They also decided to let the country’s economy be run by capitalistic principles of supply and demand and free markets. This took the government out of the job of picking winners and losers, which would have created an environment rife with corruption, and put it into the hands of individual Americans. This freedom empowered millions of hardworking, creative, risk-taking American citizens to prosper individually and to collectively create the richest and most powerful country the world has ever known. This democratic, capitalistic system has also lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in world history.

But there are those now who would throw out this most successful system in the world and replace it with what our Founders feared most, a gargantuan, bloated, corrupt and inept central government. That, of course, is what socialism is. They focus on promises that socialism and politicians can never deliver. Politicians, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, promise to solve all of your problems. Want your student loan debt forgiven? Want free healthcare? Want free college? Want guaranteed income? If you think government is too big now, wait until these socialists get control. Government will be twice as big and expensive and repressive as it is today.

This would produce a very small group of people in Washington with immense, dare I say “absolute”, power over all of us. They want the power to tell us what kind of house we can live in, what kind of car we can drive and what kind of business you can start. And remember this small group is going to be comprised of flawed, imperfect, greedy and selfish people. To quote the world famous, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman when he was talking about Socialism, “where are you going to find these “angels” who are going to organize society for us?” This was his way of reminding us that all of these people who want to run your life are flawed, greedy and selfish people who will take care of themselves first and at your expense.

Our Founders would be rolling over in their graves. They created a governmental and economic system that insulated Americans from the cold, impersonal power of a massive, corrupt central government and unleashed the awesome potential of the collective individualism of this country. As for me, I stand with our Founding Fathers and the power of freedom, liberty and the American people. Do I hear an “Amen”?