America: The Next Generation

In the News: The First New Deal and the Second New Deal

This week's news challenges us to consider what is really going on in the 21st Century battle of ideas.  As the new Obama regime takes shape, it is setting itself up to be perceived as pragmatic economic managers and sincere in its rejection of heavy handed, interventionist foreign policy. 

But what will follow the enormous injection of more government prescribed remedies for our economic woes?  Here's a sampling of opinion from some good thinkers around us and some ideas to ponder.  When you've sifted through it, from your own perspective, please share your own comments and thoughts.

Obama's "New" New Deal
By ckennedy
The world was greeted on Saturday with Barack Obama’s announcement of a massive public works program to “save or create at least 2-1/2 million jobs so that the nearly 2 million Americans who’ve lost them know that they have a future,” ...

United Liberty - Free Market... - http://www.unitedliberty.org/

Personal Responsibility vs. Government Intervention

Among the ideals that have made America a great and strong nation is that of personal responsibility. We are not a nation of dependents.  We are Americans because of a frontier spirit.  We were founded on the principles of self-reliance and responsibility for our actions. If we were successful in our endeavors, we reaped the rewards; if we failed, we took our "lumps", retrenched and tried again.   Over time, we have begun to lose sight of this concept. Today, we have a Congress does not believe in risk and reward, success and failure, individual liberty and personal responsibility. The action by Congress in regard to the Wall Street and banking failures, and now with the automotive manufacturers has been characterized as "capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down."  The message is it is OK to take risks while you are succeeding, so much so that if failure looms, the government will swoop in to save you - at least if you have enough assets to get them to pay attention.   The problem in the long run is the loss of accountability and responsibility. Risk has been largely removed for those annoited by the government, and increased dramatically for those who do not have that clout. Corporations may get the message that they can take all the chances they want, be lazy, complacent, inefficient, even corrupt. No problem. The government will rescue you with the taxpayers' dollars. When there is no risk of failure, individuals and corporations lose their sense of proportionate risk; greed replaces a healthy skepticism. What are the lessons we are teaching our children, who will one day run the small businesses, farms and corporations in this land?   It takes courage to oppose the powers that be, to stand tall and say it is not the government's responsibility to step in when businesses fail. But it is the best thing for everyone concerned in the long run. Businesses will learn to be better, smarter, and wiser.   We understand that when a business fails, people lose jobs and livelihoods - it's painful and it deserves the concern of government as well as private citizens.  In a truly unencumbered free market, opportunities will be available for people to start over and build wealth. If we ever actually make policy of these core principles, we will all be better off as individuals and as a nation.

How One Young Voter Changed His Mind

In a time when our President was stuck in foreign policy quagmire in th Middle East, and there was also an economic crisis threatening every American household, it's easy to understand how an 18 year old college freshman from Indiana would cast a vote for change and a new direction for the future. 

It's what I did - but the year was 1980, and Barack Obama was not running for President, he was voting for the first time as well.  The hope and change candidate who prevailed that year was Ronald Reagan.  But he wasn't the candidate I supported.  I voted for John Anderson.  I voted for John Anderson, who promised he would raise the tax on gasoline by 50 cents a gallon at a time when gas prices had soared more than at any previous time in our history. 

But John Anderson would not send me, or my friends, off to war.  John Anderson  was different from Jimmy Carter, who had miserably failed to deal with the crisis of Americans held hostage in Iran.  Jimmy Carter has also reinstituted the Selective Service registration, in the event he at some point decided we needed to draft young men to go to war.  Jimmy Carter's friends, who have tried to rewrite history to make him into a lover of peace should include that fact in their praise and love of him.

Champions of Freedom

Martin Luther King was very fond of a tract that was written in America in the middle of the 19th Century.  The tract was written by Henry David Thoreau. 

Thoreau was a naturalist - an early environmentalist from the 19th Century.  He was anti-slavery and opposed the Mexican American War.  He was his era's equivalent of a 21st Century liberal Democrat - but for one thing: Thoreau did not believe the solutions to these problems could be gained primarily through government intervention.  Rather Thoreau believed that all of the social problems he observed, were made worse by the use of governmental power, even when it was asserted with the best intentions in mind.

In Civil Disobedience, his 1849 essay, which provided a model for 20th Century leaders of the civil rights movement, Thoreau made the often quoted quip: "that government is best which governs least".

Which Direction for Change?

Barack Obama will be our next President.  Congratulations to those who supported him so vigorously and waited for this day - a day we can hope that the war in Iraq will no longer be the central focus of all our news and public interest, and a day when our country's leaders will not act as if economic turmoil can rattle a calm direction of leadership. 

For all the African Americans who thought this was an impossible dream, and for all the young people who may have a better reason to believe their siblings, friends and spouses may not have to die fighting a war in a foreign land – these are extraordinary things and they nearly bring tears to my eyes to think about how good it must feel for those people.

It seems appropriate and good to take a few days, even a few weeks to celebrate the good side of things this election means before the inauguration of the new President and the swearing in of a new Congress.