Photo Credit: J. David Ake / AP
Buried deep in the heart of mankind is the emotional need for security. For instance, all of us have a need to feel reasonably secure we will have access to food, shelter, clothing, and physical safety both this week and next.
This intense need for emotional security is met in two diametrically opposed ways. Both require a degree of faith because they bridge the gap from the known present to the unknown future. The traditional American way to feel secure is through religious faith. For instance, the once nearly pervasive American belief was that every able person should work hard for a living, give to others less fortunate, and then trust in God to provide for unknown variables outside of one’s personal control. The competing modern secular way to feel secure is to have faith in government security. This government centric world view, which the United States initially shunned for our first two centuries of existence, is now being adopted en masse in America. The question begs- what world view has the best effect on long-term human happiness and financial prosperity?
Americans have a long history of being highly autonomous and fiercely individualistic. Our ancestors stepped off ships like the Mayflower with hardly anything more than the desire for religious freedom in their hearts and the clothes on their backs. Many early colonies operated by the Biblical principle that, “if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either (2 Thessalonians 3:10b NASB).” To provide the emotional security needed to feel happy and secure amidst constant unknown frontier variables they lived by the faith motto, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind [i.e. government] and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. For he will be like a bush in the desert and will not see when prosperity comes, but will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt without inhabitant. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by the water, that extends its roots by a stream and will not fear when the heat comes; but its leaves will be green, and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit’” (Jeremiah 17:5-8 NASB). The colonist’s lack of need to trade in a portion of their personal freedom for Great Britain’s government security made them indomitable during our War for Independence.
Today as America’s rugged individualistic beliefs of faith, freedom, privacy, and property are being displaced by a bureaucratic redistributive state, are we better off? I would argue that we are not.
History tells us that individual freedom with a competitive market economy outperforms a bureaucratic redistributive economy every single time without exception. For instance, from 1776 to the mid-1960s, the United States topped virtually every country in the world for economic growth, academic performance, individual health, and freedom from crime. Individual freedom and personal responsibility had not only created the most prosperous nation on the planet but also the highest standard of living in world history. Then we decided to tinker with the system to try to pull a small minority of people up out of poverty but in the process sank more people down into it.
President Lyndon Johnson first declared war on poverty in 1964 by throwing billions of dollars at it, and in the process only made it worse and permanently institutionalized it. When the federal government offered a welfare benefit to single-parent families in order to break the poverty cycle, it expanded the single-parent family structure from the minority structure to the majority structure in certain neighborhoods. Today, the more money we provide to programs like food stamps, the more people we permanently ensnare in the program. The first and foremost principle of any social program should be to make it temporary in nature with the express goal of springing people out of the poverty trap- not to create a permanently dependent voting constituency.
The economic challenge with switching from “in God we trust,” to “in government we trust,” is that government bureaucracy is the least efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services throughout a society. Bureaucracies tend to hobble their customers in endless red tape while obfuscating their own personal responsibility and accountability. It stands to reason that a bureaucratically run country will always be the least prosperous. History has shown this to be true. Worse, when bureaucracies become too large, they tend to make self-interest their raison d’être and can develop a paranoia for self-preservation and expansion. In communist countries this paranoia manifests itself in Stasi-style secret police, domestic spying, and armed paramilitary enforcement divisions. These bureaucracies constantly trumpet real or imagined existential threats to our security in order to snatch away personal liberty and privacy while jealously persecuting all rivals to its trust. In certain countries religion itself gets banned as competitor to the faith in the state.
In free countries, an intense market competition always drives down prices, creates constant innovation, and rewards hard work with a better life. In contrast, a centrally planned competitionless society fails to provide the necessary challenge that individuals need to achieve greatness, and therefore lowers academic and economic performance to the lowest common denominator- as is witnessed by our gasping economy and failing public schools now ranked 29th in the world in math.
Freedom is insecure prosperity. Socialism is secure communal misery administered by insecure bureaucracy. Freedom requires privacy for existence and therefore holds it sacrosanct. Socialism declares war on privacy because it fears individual freedom. Freedom challenges individuals to do great things with their lives and conquer what was once deemed unconquerable. Socialism encourages individuals to become collective dependents of the bureaucracy. The Founding Father’s expression of their faith is printed on our currency in the form of, “In God we trust.” We all must choose where to put our faith.
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“Daniel Hamm resides in Palmer Alaska. He is an international airline pilot, small business owner, author, and active in local politics.”
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