God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

  As I traveled across China, it was impossible not to notice the rapid growth and modernization that’s taking place since the Communist government loosened its grip a bit on entrepreneurs. Now, many Americans fear that China might grow too strong. I must confess that I’m not too worried about China getting too strong. I’m more worried that America might be getting too weak.

  It’s not bad for the United States if other nations have a strong economy. One fewer hungry-mouthed country wanting us to take care of it and its people is great news. If they have money, maybe they will buy the things we innovate and make. Instead, we need to fear that we will quit innovating and making things because excess taxation, regulation, and litigation will drive the jobs and the money away from American working men and women.

  I was stunned that China is becoming more like America used to be, while America is becoming more like China used to be. Even more frustrating, they’re doing it by emulating the free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism that made America great, even as we seem to be abandoning it. While America’s infrastructure crumbles, China is busy building roadways, bridges, airports, and utility systems. China is still a Communist-governed country, and we’re still a constitutional republic, but they are allowing more and more free enterprise and personal ownership. Meanwhile, we’re watching our government take away land rights and personal and religious freedoms at a stunning rate. I certainly don’t want what still remains of Chinese communism, but maybe we could loan them our Constitution. It doesn’t appear that we’re using it much these days anyhow.

  Of course, America still has some advantages over China. The Chinese government exercises strict control over the Internet, blocking Facebook, YouTube, and a host of Web sites, including the New York Times site, because they feel it’s propaganda. But then, we have members of Congress pushing for greater control over the Internet as well. And I’m not so sure the Chinese don’t have it right about The New York Times.

  The Chinese scrub their history books of moments like the brutal killing of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Good thing we don’t rewrite our history to ignore parts of it that aren’t politically correct! But wait, have you seen an American history textbook lately? They leave out the great and inspiring parts of our history and concentrate solely on the negatives. Can you find a history book that extols the spiritual dimensions of our nation’s history? Do you often hear of the intense and protracted prayer meetings that preceded the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Of the worship services held in the Capitol in the early days of our nation’s history? Schoolchildren read that America is an imperialistic aggressor, but do they read how we rebuilt countries like Japan and Germany after they tried to destroy us?

  If China were like us, their history books would have one paragraph on the Ming Dynasty and five hundred pages on the Tiananmen Square massacre. Instead, they have scrubbed their history books of any mention of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. When we asked our young thirty-year-old guide about the events there as we stood in the square just days before the twenty-fifth anniversary, she looked at us with bewilderment because she had no idea what had happened there.

  China is notorious for spying on its citizens and using the full force of government to monitor its people and minimize dissent and religious expression. Thank God the United States would never do that! Unless you count our government collecting our phone calls and Web searches, reading our e-mails, tracking us through our cell phones, and systematically scrubbing God from the public square.

  China’s government regulates much of daily life for its citizens, from housing and health care to education and personal artistic freedom, but one can still see a lot of personal freedoms in public parks, where people can sing, dance, or do Tai Chi. I’m pretty sure that if people used personal amplification devices in New York’s Central Park, the nanny-state city government would send in the cops to confiscate both their microphones and their Big Gulps.

  China has a history of dealing harshly with those it perceives as its enemies—some simply disappear. We have strict constitutional protections in America to guarantee civil rights, such as being able to face our accuser and not having our homes searched or our property seized without a warrant. No government agency can find us guilty without a trial and seize our property. Well, except the IRS. And the DEA, if we’re suspected of having anything to do with drugs. And we can lose our right to life if we happen to be sitting where a drone drops a bomb or fires a missile at (or near) us. But, hey, at least it saves the cost of a pesky trial.

  Sometimes the people we kill aren’t even our enemies. Sometimes, they are our veterans, who thought we’d give them protection and health care. They gave us our liberties; by mistreating them and killing them, we take away theirs. The scandals of the Veterans Affairs (VA) system are shocking and disgusting, knowing that VA employees falsified documents to make it appear that our veterans were scheduled for appointments they never had. Senator Tom Coburn found that as many as one thousand veterans died from the shoddy treatment. Veterans should get the first fruits of our treasury—not the leftovers.

  That’s why I say I don’t fear that China is becoming more like the United States used to be. I fear America is becoming more like China used to be.

  But China is hardly the only nation that’s starting to look at America in the rear view mirror. Each year, the Heritage Foundation issues its “Index of Economic Freedom.” They define economic freedom as the “fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property.” They rank 186 nations based on various aspects of four categories: the Rule of Law (whether or not the law protects property rights and is administered free of corruption), Limited Government (including freedom from ruinous government spending), Regulatory Efficiency, and Open Markets.

  In the 2014 ranking, Hong Kong (which is under the jurisdiction of China) was rated number one in economic freedom. It was followed by Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Canada. So where was America, the “Land of the Free”? In twelfth place, just behind Estonia. The Heritage Foundation placed the USA in the “mostly free” category. I guess we should count our blessings that we’re still “mostly free.”

  Of course, this hardly means that American business owners will be closing their factories and fleeing to Estonia (well, some of them in California might). But it does mean that when it comes to five areas in which America should be leading the world—fiscal freedom, government spending, monetary freedom, financial freedom, and property freedom—America now trails behind eleven other nations. Some of the criteria may be debatable; for instance, the freedom in some nations to fire workers without a lot of paperwork or legal exposure might not seem like a positive if you happen to be a worker. But if you’re the person deciding where to locate the corporate headquarters, there’s no question that it puts a check mark in the Estonia column.

  Sadly, there are a number of other international rankings where the United States has to settle for the “Honorary Mention” ribbon. The World Economic Forum ranks 148 nations for competitiveness, defined as “the set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country,” which measures its economic growth potential. In the 2013–2014 rankings, the United States came in fifth, behind Switzerland, Singapore, Finland, and Germany. The World Economic Forum now ranks the United States, land of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, seventh in the world in innovation. And in the nonpartisan Legatum Institute’s annual Prosperity Index, the USA has fallen from fourth in 2008 to eleventh out of 142 nations in 2013.

  How is it possible that the United States, a nation founded by immigrants who came here seeking more freedom, opportunities, and prosperity than they could ever dream of in their native lands, could have fallen behind so many of those nations in those very same areas? Again, it’s because as more nations have adopted at least some aspects of what made America great, we are rapidly abandoning those same winning principles. Can we fix it?
Of course! But not by doing dumb things like electing people to lead the country who are clueless about how jobs are created.

  For decades now, progressives have drilled into young people’s heads the notions that America is the source of all evil; that capitalism harms the lower and middle classes while socialism uplifts them (history teaches us that the exact opposite is the case); that successful people get rich not by creating products that other people want but by stealing from everyone else; that everyone is entitled to all sorts of things just by virtue of being born and that someone else should pay for them; that people who achieve success aren’t smart and hardworking but “winners in life’s lottery”; and that if you have a business, no matter how much you worked and sacrificed to create it, “you didn’t build that.” (Gosh, who told them that?)

  In the 2008 election, American voters, angry at Republicans over the Middle Eastern wars and panicked by the economic meltdown and the insanity of rewarding the people who caused it with big fat bailouts, took one of the biggest gambles in history. They entrusted the reins of government to Barack Obama, the least experienced and most liberal person ever elected President, and gave his party unstoppable control of both Houses of Congress. They pursued a classic liberal agenda on steroids: the biggest expansion of government power in decades (Obamacare), along with ballooning government, taxes, regulations, and deficit spending to stimulate the economy. To be fair, that big stimulus (“porkulus” as I like to call it) was precipitated by the Republicans pushing the Wall Street bailouts. I mean, once you forked over $700 billion to a bunch of inept Ivy League–educated executives who gambled their companies’ and their clients’ assets into the dirt, how can you say that it’s a bad idea to throw some more money out there for everyone else—even if “everyone else” never saw it because it went to the President’s cronies for their windmills.

  But the $800 billion–plus from the stimulus bill that was touted as creating “shovel-ready” jobs largely went to keeping government employees from suffering the same layoffs as private sector workers, while also rewarding crony corporations. Even Obama had to admit that there were no “shovel-ready jobs.” Of course, that was mostly thanks to the environmentalists who supported him; every time someone gets near a shovel these days, EPA attorneys descend on him like a swarm of mosquitoes on a summer night in a rice field. We needed a shovel all right—to scoop up the horse manure substituting for policy.

  All this Big Government and big spending acted less like a stimulant than a tranquilizer, as the jobless economy struggled on for years past the point when history would suggest it should have recovered and even boomed. With no concrete accomplishments to point to, Obama’s supporters had to invent some out of thin air, claiming that without all this government intervention, why, it would have been even worse! With few new jobs to point to, they instead started counting “saved jobs,” as if anyone who miraculously still had a job should thank the government for “saving” it.

  The American people, many of them by now working three part-time jobs to survive, gave those claims the same fish-eye that people gave Jimmy Stewart in the movie Harvey when he introduced his giant, invisible rabbit pal, and promptly voted the Republicans back into power in the House of Representatives. But by then, the damage was done, and with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blocking every House attempt to undo it, it’s continued to fester year by year.

  We now have a plethora of government leaders who are happy to scold business owners and corporations for not hiring more people or building factories in America, but who would never dream of changing the government policies that punish those very things. For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists!

  If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits.

  The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.

  The leaders of other nations must sometimes marvel at the way America is tying its own hands as it competes with them on the economic playing field. Many of those other nations have already been down that Big Government “progressive” road and know it’s a dead end.

  Not long after the 2008 global recession, President Obama tried to push progressivism on other nations, such as Germany. He wanted them to follow America’s lead and okay even more stimulus spending to help debt-ridden European Union nations stay afloat. Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that you can spend your way out of debt. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, considered the meltdown to be caused by unregulated bubble markets and out-of-control government spending. She saw no reason why more government spending should be used to reinflate the bubble, or why German taxpayers should be bled dry to pay for it. Her response was to propose tighter regulations on banks and to cut government spending while putting strict conditions on the use of bailout money loaned to struggling nations (aka “imposing austerity”). In my world growing up, it was simply called “living within your means.” My mother used to say when I wanted something we couldn’t afford, “Boy, you’ve got a champagne appetite and a Coca-Cola pocketbook!”

  There were massive protests in debtor nations such as Greece, and Obama indirectly lectured Merkel that austerity policies might destroy the fragile recovery. Some nations agreed with him, such as France, which went “all in” by electing an outright socialist, François Hollande, as President and giving him a socialist Parliament.

  Hollande imposed the predictable economic solutions of punishing the successful, including a controversial 75 percent millionaire’s tax. These measures caused capital to flee from France and even led French film icon Gerard Depardieu to give up his French passport and move to Belgium and be granted citizenship by Russia, which charges him a 6 percent income tax rate. (I hear that in exchange, he must appear in every movie made in Russia, the way he did in France.) Panicking at the public revolt, Hollande promised to enact some market-based reforms, such as cutting spending to reduce the deficit, enacting some pro-growth policies, and capping government worker salaries. But it was too little too late. The voters took a sharp right turn in the next election. Sound familiar?

  The results of these two competing economic philosophies were stark and revealing. In the first quarter of 2014, weak consumer spending and business investment caused France’s economic growth to grind to a standstill at zero (it could’ve been worse; at least it didn’t shrink 2.9 percent, as ours did). Meanwhile, Germany, which ignored Obama’s fiscal policy lecture, is now the “economic powerhouse of Europe.” In the first quarter of 2014, Germany’s GDP grew 0.8 percent. Their unemployment rate was 5.1 percent, while America’s was 6.3 percent. And our jobless rate could be achieved only by massaging the numbers harder than a German masseuse.

  Our underemployment rate (which includes the jobless; “discouraged workers” who’ve been jobless so long, they’ve given up looking; and people working part-time because it’s all they can find) was 13.4 percent. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that, as of April 2014, a record 92,594,000 Americans were not working. That translates to just a 62.8 percent labor
force participation rate, which matches a thirty-six-year low.

  For those who try to claim that’s just due to baby boomers retiring, the BLS also noted that in April 2014, the labor force participation rate for Americans aged 25–29 was 79.8 percent, the lowest level since 1982 when the BLS started keeping records.

  The pity is that many Americans outside the elite bubbles know exactly what’s wrong, but our leaders seem determined to do nothing about it. Any attempt to cut the government chains and anchors off businesses so they can get back to growing, innovating, and creating jobs is demagogued as “tax breaks for the rich” or “favors for the one-percenters.” Never mind that many of those who would benefit are small-business owners who’ve been decimated over the past few years, first by the economic meltdown, then by government policies put in place to “fix” it. The money printed by the Fed to keep the economy pumped up flows to Wall Street, not Main Street, so small businesses aren’t borrowing it to pay for expansion. Even if they wanted to expand, about a third of all U.S. workers are employed by businesses with fifty or fewer employees, and Obamacare insures that if they hire a fifty-first, they’ll face crippling new costs for mandated health care.

  I remember when I was a kid seeing books that imagined what the world would be like if Germany had beaten America or if China took over the world. The authors of such wild, speculative history never imagined that one day, those scenarios might seem shockingly plausible. Except that Germany and China wouldn’t defeat America by military force. They’d surpass us by copying the fundamental tenets of the American economy—free markets, rewarding innovation, limiting regulation, letting people keep the fruits of their labor—that the elites in Bubble-ville seem to have forgotten all about. In Bubba-ville, we still think the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world, but we know it won’t be if we don’t return to the principles we were built on. And it starts with a God who gave birth to this nation and miraculously preserved us through battles we should have lost.