Responsibility

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 7: Responsibility

• Take care of ourselves and our own.  Life is hard.  Responsible people don’t care about that.  They do what it takes with their own hands out rather than with a handout.

The alternative is a life of complaining, dependency, looking to others for support, an unappealing sense of entitlement, and finally self-certification as a victim needing a savior.

America is approaching a responsibility inflection point.  Growing irresponsibility is the trend in motion, and it’s about to reach critical mass.  At some point, those who are responsible will be too few to support the many who aren’t.  Not too long after that, the responsible ones will have more incentives to shed responsibility than to keep it, and too many handouts of their own to turn them down without feeling foolish.

There won’t be enough money to support all of the dependents, not in the style to which they’ve become accustomed, not, in fact, in any significant way.  Then Americans can take the cynical view of the old Russian who said about his government, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

• Transform public schools into community schools run by parents and supported by the community.  There’s a lot more to education than transferring knowledge and developing critical thinking skills.

Real education concerns itself with character and wisdom – almost impossible to address in a government school – unless it’s the wrong message, like “We should never judge anyone about anything.”  Parents want their children to get the knowledge and learn the skills, but they also want their hearts and minds and wills set in the right direction.

“The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things,” noted British philosopher Samuel Johnson, “the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.”[i]  Parents and communities worry rightly about this, and want to make sure that this is the overriding educational mission.  Today they see that this is often the one thing that won’t be taught.

Public education as it stands has lost most, if not all, of this mission and too often serves as a propaganda vehicle for dogmatic messages – earlier conservative, now liberal.  Schools should be funded by communities, with parents paying a larger amount than citizens without children, but also having a larger say.

It is simply time for the separation of school and state, for taking the “right” to indoctrinate away from people who really know how to do it.

• Demand the separation of school and state.  School and state are both decent concepts, but much like the combination of church and state they are problematic when put too close together.

The public school is a great equalizer, an outstanding way for even the poorest person to find success.  But as soon as it’s mixed up with government rather than community?  It becomes a breeding ground for ideological warfare, big business-big labor greed and conflict, elitism, political manipulation, redistribution from richer to poorer districts (often with little or nothing to show for it), and leveling to a lowest-common-denominator as unaccountable systems inflate grades and refuse to admit failure.

Other bad results are:

• Many political edicts from on high
• Washington funding for stupid and worthless curricula
• Massive bureaucracies guzzling resources that could be spent on educating children
• Under-populated schools that could be operated efficiently by communities closed (and often torn down) by strategic-planning, resource-allocating, systemic behemoths
• Giant, rigid unions in too-close collaboration with giant, rigid government
• Tenure for miserable teachers
• Protection of those spreading notions offensive to parents and destructive to students

In some ways school and state is even worse than church and state.  Church and state combines to impose their wishes from on high onto the physically enslaved masses, while the state uses the school to impose its wishes directly onto the youngest and most innocent.  Alexis de Tocqueville said that all people in such a system

are at last constrained, whatever may be their standard, to pass the same ordeal; all are indiscriminately subjected to a multitude of petty preliminary exercises, in which their youth is wasted and their imagination quenched, so that they despair of ever fully attaining what is held out to them; and when at length they are in a condition to perform any extraordinary acts, the taste for such things has left them.[ii]

The best schools, like the best governments, are small, local and very accountable to the people who interface with them every day.

• Stop expecting others to bail us out as individuals, families, or groups.  We have to stop looking to others to provide for us or give to us or support our desired lifestyle.  It isn’t seemly, it isn’t beneficial (or even possible) in the long run, and it isn’t American.

Responsibility for others should be based on connection, relationship and commitment, not on citizenship, government power and the buying of votes.

The only thing politicians should be promising is to protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic.  Anything more – giving money, advantage, rescue – is their clever way of getting us to make a deal with the devil for our political souls.  And they won’t even do it with their own money.  They’ll take from the responsible people without much restraint, to give it to others with many restraints.

• Be generous with those who can’t exercise responsibility for themselves.  In the middle of a very individualistic culture, Americans have always been generous with the community around them.  This was a voluntary response to the needs they saw and knew to be real.

But one of the huge differences between heartfelt generosity and gunpoint generosity is the way the generosity is administered.  People who are giving their own money and time have a personal stake in ensuring that this only goes to the truly down-and-out.  They give on a scale that can be managed and monitored.  And they don’t usually have ulterior motives, like buying the recipient’s support for a cause.

Government has no personal stake.  Regardless of the recently acquired and unseemly habit of politicians telling sad stories about individuals, the programs are about huge amounts of money distributed to large numbers of people.  The scale is so large that waste, fraud and corruption come as standard accessories.  Even a 1 percent growth in the program involves tens of millions of dollars.  From the birth of the first horse-trading politician, and expanded dramatically under Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, government charity has mostly been about the votes.

We can’t let government take the well-earned responsibility for generosity away from us.  (See much more on this in the American Idea of Generosity.)

• Call out and reject victimitis.  We should be generous with true victims, and turned off by the posers.

Posers include people who could actually work, provide for themselves and their families, get an education, develop useful skills, and own up to the consequences of their decisions and actions.   Posers can claim recompense for past injustices, even though the people who suffered those injustices are dead and the injustices themselves have vanished

It’s an amazing thing to watch people with massive disabilities work their hearts out in sheltered workshops, while people with no disability but their attitude hive off the government and leech off their fellow citizens.  We need to tell people to get up and do something that adds value to society.  You say life is tough?  Well, it’s tough for everyone.  Welcome to the club.

• Replace political correctness with responsibly-delivered truth.  We can’t allow ourselves to be stopped by political correctness.

In earlier times, Americans spoke about being gracious and kind and socially appropriate, but the political arena was a place where any opinion could be expressed.  Now we have countless restraints on the free expression of opinion, even while general graciousness and kindness and appropriateness have all but disappeared.

Let’s not confuse being honest with being rude.  Calling a lazy person “lazy” is not only needed and accurate, but a gift to that person if they will listen and change.

It’s time to erase the disease of victimitis.  Someone who claims to be a victim when they’re not is nothing less than a very bad American.

• Measure freedom in responsibility terms.  President John Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  Well, the best thing most of us can do for our country is to take personal responsibility, not join a government-sponsored program.

Every time we hear someone talking about freedom, we need to remind them of the responsibility that goes along with whatever freedom they’re talking about.  We need to ask them what keeping that freedom entails.

Freedom is hard to maintain, but it’s easy to talk about it in a free society.  It simply can’t be maintained without responsibility.  Responsibility is also hard to maintain, but we need to make it just as easy to talk about it as we do with freedom.

• Welcome limitations that enhance freedom.  American culture has been paralyzed by an unwillingness to set limitations that protect the freedom of others.

Drunk drivers keep their licenses, drunks who commit homicide with their cars aren’t treated as murderers, and tens of thousands of innocent people pay with their lives and health and ability to live freely.  Children can watch anything on an unrestrained television or internet, and are enslaved by sex and the lying equation that love = sex.

Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, stated,

The truth is, it is not their fault.  They are the victim of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.[iii]

We have to fight against the attractive but disastrously inaccurate notion that any limitation destroys freedom.  Not all limitations are good.  But some of them are.

• Refuse government offers of care that lead to government supremacy.  We should disbelieve whenever government promises to take care of us.

We should:

• Oppose every attempt by government to be generous with other peoples’ money
• Limit taxes and eliminate government borrowing, which will likely never be paid back anyway.
• Eliminate the “inflation tax,” which wipes away the value of our earned resources through the hidden tax of printing money.

Government compassion is an oxymoron.

• Remove government from the business of taking individual responsibility away from individuals.  We have to be willing to step back and review unsustainable programs that were created by a bad combination of a generous American spirit and a cynical political spirit.

Social Security is one such program.  First, it’s based on a series of lies.  They call the money taken from our paychecks and from our employers “contributions,” but they are really taxes.  They talk about our accounts, but there are no accounts.  They talk about setting aside these funds for our retirement, but the funds are actually being split – part sent to people who are already retired, part borrowed by the overweening federal budget.  In reality it is the largest Ponzi scheme ever created.

Second, Social Security is unsustainable.  Since it has always been an outstanding way to secure the votes of the people most likely to vote – the elderly – the monthly payments have gone up and up without regard for mathematical reality.  Combined with longer life spans, the total payout to individuals has gone up and up without regard for actuarial reality.  As with all Ponzi schemes, those who sign up last lose the most.  Whether this will be Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, or Millennials – or all of the above – is the only unresolved question.

But third, Social Security is an abuse of limited government.  It’s a perfect vehicle for creating a paternalistic powerhouse with dependents who no longer have any other place to turn.  People don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.  Instead, they get to beg for more from their (hopefully benevolent) master, while hoping that their longer lives don’t lead to a call for easier euthanasia.

This and other entitlement programs are economically and financially unsound, but that isn’t the place to take a stand.  That place is on principle.  Those programs violate the American Idea of Responsibility.  We can’t agree with the government taking on this unwarranted responsibility, but then somehow think we’re taking a principled stand because we argue against how much they’re spending on that bogus activity.

• Refuse to let the government reverse delegate its responsibilities back to us.  While government can wander into areas that should be none of its business, it can push back onto us what it should be doing.

For example, why is it the responsibility of business to determine who is in the country legally or illegally?  This should be done by the government at the border.  Government wants to allow porous borders and then catch illegal aliens at the point of employment – with a side benefit of catching businesses who fail to be immigration experts.

Perhaps businesses should get to inspect government work at the borders instead of government inspecting businesses after government has failed at the border.  Business should, in fact, be able to rely on a responsible government, and freely hire anyone who has been allowed to walk around and look for a job.

• Take charge of government and politicians.  We’ve got to box it in.

Government can be an odd mixture of the hapless – politicians incapable of doing anything but protecting their “phony baloney jobs”[iv] – and the ruthless – politicians doing whatever it takes to enhance their power and influence, if not their checking accounts.  But no matter.  Whatever most of them are doing, we can be sure that it’s more in their long-term interest than it is in ours.

This is so not because politicians are worse than us, but because they’re like us (perhaps on steroids).  The problem is human nature, and what it does when it seeks and wins government power.

A government that performs only the essential services is mandatory because people are imperfect, but a government that performs more than the essential services is a huge problem for the same reason.  It needs a nanny – checks and balances – but it also needs parents with firm disciplinary standards.  That’s us.

• Be responsible for our own health and well-being.  We can’t let ourselves fall for government’s phony or exaggerated claims that allow it to take over more and more.  As of this writing, “health insurance for all” has become the government’s mantra and lawmaking focus.  Does government belong in the healthcare business?  Not likely.  Will it do a good job of it?  No more likely.

And the claim itself – that health insurance is crucial to living a healthy life – may not even be true.  “Quite possibly,” noted an essay in The Atlantic, “lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance…[in the] largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effects of insurance on mortality…In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.”[v]

Government didn’t ask for more data, or even review the data that actually existed, before creating the largest new entitlement program in over 40 years.  It didn’t ask in part because it didn’t want to know.  What it wanted was to take over health care.

Some people say, “But the government already runs a big part of the healthcare system, with Medicare and Medicaid.”  True, but as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, “It’s poor salesmanship.”[vi]  Those programs are unsustainable, and as pointed out in the same Atlantic essay, “Analyses of the effect of Medicare, which becomes available to virtually everyone in America at the age of 65, shows little benefit…Medicare increases consumption of medical care and may modestly improve self-reported health but has no effect on mortality.”[vii]

Who should be in charge of your life and health?  You.  And that should be more than enough.