Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
~ Ronald Reagan

Forgive me if, for the first time, I diverge somewhat from the topic of healthcare. What I have to say, however, I believe to be of great importance.

While at a wedding last week I had the opportunity to sit down with the father of a friend of mine and talk about the current political atmosphere. The conversation was, of course, made all the more poignant due to the financial crisis and the "bailout" plan that simply "needed" to pass. It was not a particularly positive conversation.

More than all the professor's I've ever had (without a doubt), all the speeches I've ever heard (most certainly), or all the books I've ever read (most likely), this man in all probability represents the genesis of my political philosophy, as it was him who first introduced me to the ideas to which today I hold so dear.

In the last few weeks, even controlling for the expected conditions of an electoral season, there has been an inordinate amount of hot air around Washington, D.C., particularly when it comes to economics. "Capitalism has failed," we are told so readily, and neither party seems eager to refute that notion, thus, the adage sticks.

To most clear thinking people however, or rather ,economists on both the right and the left (those nutso people who actually study what happens when markets do what they do), we are not witnessing a failure of capitalism, far from it. What we are witnessing instead is the inevitable consequence of government meddling in the marketplace and seeing first hand the lengths to which politicians will go to avoid blame for their own misdeeds (In this vein, I submit, as exhibit 1, the fact that, despite all of the pontification politicians make about their own ability to mold the market towards positive results when the crisis occurs, not a one [save a select few] is willing to admit that perhaps their manipulative policies in the past may have yielded poor results and contributed to this in the first place.) The financial crisis we find ourselves in, pure and simple, is the result of failed government policy, as is so much else.

Let us consider the facts:

Interest rates were, for far too long, kept artificially low and, for lack of a better phrase, made money far too cheap. Couple this with the stated purpose of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (to increase home ownership) bolstered by the Community Reinvestment Act, and one begins to see how the compounded effects of all these factors (risky loans to risky individuals diversified and made into securities with deceptively low risk and spread throughout the global financial system) brought us to our current impasse.

The point of our conversation however had not so much to do with how we arrived at our predicament but rather the sociological implications that seem prevalent in the discussions over the appropriate measures of recovery. There is near uniformity of thought in the belief that more regulation, more "reigning in" of capitalism, is needed to lead us out of this crisis, the implication necessarily being of course that there is a corresponding depreciation in the merits attributed to lassiez-faire capitalism, that silly little thing that managed to (as has somehow been forgotten) made the U.S. the most prosperous nation in history. There is no talk of course about the possibility that unmerited and onerous regulations led us astray in the first place. Then again, the concept of any political ineptitute never really plays well when votes are on the line (witness primary McCain: "I'm always for deregulation." vs. election McCain: "The government needs to buy up bad mortgages and reign in the greed on Wall Street.") Obama never really had to change, he's never really cared about the principles this country was founded on (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11OhmY1obS4, or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQXcImQfubM).

What we both found disturbing however was the overwhelming readiness of the vox populi to abandon the source of our prosperity in lieu of the vagaries of political promises having no basis in the realities of policy. There is something that my generation lacks and, in fairness, it is not altogether our fault.

This country has been very good to a great many generations of Americans; people who have worked hard, saved, lived within their means, had the "audacity of hope" as one senator would call it, and dared to think, and work, for themselves. Their children, my generation, seems not to have adopted the spirit which brought about that prosperity but rather inherited the sense of entitlement that comes along with a life spent working towards ones goals. The gifts our parents strove so diligently to provide us have been lost in the luxury so provided.

Our generational (and, to an extent, even our national)sense of entitlement is out of sync with our own ambitions, let alone our accomplishments. Without remedy, this is a condition which could spell nothing short of paralysis for a nation.

Let us be clear: I do not mean to suggest some kind of grand revival movement for the "sake of the nation," or anything of the sort. That is ridiculous, and to suggest anything similar would be to warrant the will of the individual subservient to that of the nation, an idea long suggested by the communists and fascists of the world. We should have learned this lesson well in our own country in the midst of the Progressive era, along with it's Red Scare's and populist demagoguery. A great nation is composed of individuals pursuing their own definition of greatness, not a population of sprouts fulfilling the grand ambitions of self-proclaimed reformers seeking to remake society in concordance with their own ambitions. Such foolishness is not only doomed to fall short of its stated goals but almost entirely certain to destroy a great many individual dreams in the process, to say nothing of the individuals.

Such is the sad state of affairs we find ourselves in. Our generation seems poised to accept, or rather demand, a "leader" to define for us what the future must look like, while we ourselves have lost the courage to define for ourselves what the world we must inherit will resemble.

In a general sense, this can be attributed to the modern state of politics, which is also of our own doing ("Whatever else it may be, in a Democracy you always get the government you deserve." -Alexis de Tocqueville), where vague promises pass for concrete policies.

Many of use have come to accept what has become known as the "middle way," which sounds moderate and un-radical. Barack Obama is a champion in couching his policies in such terms. Its appeal, according to Jonah Goldberg, is that it sounds unideological and freethinking. But this is not the case. It is both utopian and authoritarian, seemingly cohesive yet contradictory at its very core.

Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics, or economics for that matter, is about trade offs. The Third Wayer says that there are no false choices - 'I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y.' The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly utopian because they assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will. The populist demagogue takes on the role of the parent telling the childlike masses that he can make everything 'all better' if they just trust him.

The German and American New Deals, for instance, seem to have had no foundation as to the proper role and scope of government but were rather whatever Hitler and FDR felt they could get away with, or was 'right' at the time. When asked to outline his program, Mussolini was fond of saying that he had none. 'Our program is to govern, to do whatever is necessary,' a principle FDR and his Brain Trust expressed open admiration for. In fact, Mussolini's fascist treatise was required reading for Roosevelt cabinet members, who generally agreed that what they were implementing was rather akin to those policies put in place by Adolf Hitler, but done so 'in a more orderly way.' As if the claim to orderliness somehow absolves the acknowledgment of totalitarianism.

But therein lies a common principle: the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for 'good reasons.' This is the common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism. It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power. The leader and his anointed cadres are decision makers above and beyond political or democratic imperatives. They invoke with divine reverence 'science' and the 'laws of economics and social justice' the way temple priests once read the entrails of goats, but because they have blinded themselves to their own leaps of faith, they cannot see that morals and values cannot be derived from science. Morals and values are determined by the priests, whether they wear black robes, white lab smocks, or expensive suits.

It is this skewed perspective which allows someone like Barack Obama, who is tirelessly seeking to take the sacred oath to honor and uphold the principles of the Constitution of the United States to speak of them with with such derision. It is our morality, so to speak, that is askew. We demand reform, we demand change, we demand justice, yet all of our energies are spent on petitioning the government to undertake those endeavors for us. People wear buttons declaring "Yes We Can!" others write their congressmen, or simply vote for the candidate of "change," and applaud themselves for having performed a civic duty, saving the republic. What ever happened to the America of old? We should not be rushing to the polls when we see a need for change, we should be looking to ourselves. True success comes from the unimpeded pursuit of ones dreams. This is a moral imperative as well as it should be an economic or sociological one. What we should be demanding is not that the government intervene to correct our perceived societal inequities, but rather that it give us the freedom necessary to pursue our own ambitions in a way consistent with the ethos that brought this nation from a troublesome group of colonies to the most wealthy and powerful nation in history. In this context, wealth and power were never the ends, but rather the byproducts of the freedom to which we still profess adherence, yet through our actions denounce.

We are losing our freedom, and we should not be surprised if we lose that which it has bestowed upon us in the process.

This is a call to action, but not a political one. It is a call to every individual to stare adversity in the face and pursue happiness in their own way. It is a call on those who still revere freedom, who understand and hold dear its rewards as well as its responsibilities. It is a call on those who would reject the vain and vague promises of the political elite and instead look to themselves for answers.

Is it too late for this country, can we save it and preserve the ideals which have made it great, the ideals of liberty, individual initiative and responsibility? Well, to paraphrase a politician who stands as the antithesis to such notions: yes, I believe we can.