No Virginia, the Government Does Not Have All the Answers

I was watching the news the other day and a story was being run on the state of the economy in Iowa. In an interview with a woman, she mentioned that she can no longer depend on the government because she no longer trusts the politicians. The reporter speculated that the sentiment was a dangerous sign for the future of effective government and suggested the anecdote represented a divide that must be bridged in government’s effort to fix the economy.

Yet, that was not the impression from which I walked away. During the 1992 presidential election campaign, President George H.W. Bush was debating Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and Texas businessman Ross Perot and the three were engaged in a town-hall style debate – the first of its kind. During audience questioning, a young man posed a challenge in which he suggested that the government and the future president is like a parent and the American citizens were his children. The man asked what each candidate would do for his children. In the scope of presidential debate highlights, this does not get a great deal of play. However, it was a question that was and is symptomatic of some thinking today. From where does this attitude originate?

The short and easy answer is the New Deal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt put in place a series of programs that set up the government as instrumental in caring or providing for those who are in need. However, as transformative as the New Deal was to the power of the president in particular and of government in general, people throughout the 1940s and 1950s did not change greatly compared to those of the 1910s and 1920s. At the height of progressive and liberal governance, people were not swayed to surrender their notions completely. It was not until the 1960s, when arose a group of people mostly from affluent and comfortable families who crowded the streets and complained about the system that provided an unprecedented standard of living. The hippies were not just complaining about the war but rejecting the values that provided for their college tuition and allowed them the flexibility to protest rather than work for a living. A generation of spoiled brats began to radically change how government should operate.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in explaining his Square Deal three decades prior to his cousin’s presidency, suggested the goal was not to ensure success. How each man played the cards dealt to him was his affair. However, the government should ensure there is “no crookedness in the dealing.” The difference between equality of opportunity and the equality of success is dangerous to democracy. The government who looks upon the people as children is one that operates under a mindset of paternalism and superiority. By surrendering one’s own ability to care for themselves, as the questioner in the 1992 presidential debate was willing to do, we give the government way more power that it was ever intended and created to hold.

In the 1960s, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater suggested that a government big enough to give a citizen all he or she needs, is big enough to take it all away. So, perhaps the Iowa woman is right and historically more aligned with her predecessors a century or two ago. Why wait for the government? Why wait for people who are not directly connected to you and your family? Why wait for a monolithic institution that was never meant to answer the individual’s needs, only the country’s needs? The sooner Americans break their addiction and dependence upon the government and begin to depend upon their own talent and abilities, perhaps the better off we will be.