Thus, from its earliest days, America was based on a simple proposition: people should work hard, and in return they could keep the fruits of their labor.
There is a vivid contrast between a free, work-oriented society and the dependency-dishonesty model of Soviet Communism—and to some extent of the left-wing welfare state. Soviet workers had a motto: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Americans had a remarkably different slogan: “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” America today is still filled with small businesses, self-employed people, professionals, and others who live by that principle every day.
Because we are self-reliant and operate in markets where people won’t pay us if we cheat, Americans have created an environment where honesty pays. In contrast, the secular-socialist machine, with its commitment to a socialist vision of wealth redistribution, has undermined the very concept of “an honest day’s work,” especially through its union power. In fact, it spreads the opposite ethic: game the system to get as many benefits as you can while working as little as possible.
A typical example is the Long Island Railroad. According to a September 2008 New York Times investigation, nearly every career employee of the Long Island Railroad is approved for disability payments shortly after retiring.1 In one recent year, 97 percent of all new retirees applied for and received disability, part of a scam that has cost taxpayers at least $250 million since 2000.
Here’s another example: at the heavily unionized Big 3 auto makers in Detroit—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—thousands of workers were paid not to work. They were part of a United Auto Workers “jobs bank” plan to keep them as dues paying members even if they did nothing productive. According to Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, the jobs bank program cost the Big 3 automakers more than $4 billion between 2005 and 2008.2 With these kind of union “deals,” is it any wonder the auto companies got in such trouble?
The Post Office, which is suffering from a $7 billion deficit, has a similar program called “standby time” that pays a large group of employees more than a million dollars a week to do nothing.3 Union rules prevent the Post Office from laying off redundant workers.
Worse, New York City has “rubber rooms” to house teachers who are so incompetent they can’t be allowed to teach children. Yet because of their union contract, it takes up to seven years to fire them, so in the meantime they are paid to sit in a room and do nothing. This act of theft—taking something for nothing—costs New York City schools about $65 million a year, which should be spent on educating children.4
Or consider today’s typical mode of school attendance certification. Students are officially counted two or three times a year, and the results determine how much the school gets paid for the rest of the year. On these counting days, some schools hold “pizza days” or adopt other gimmicks to encourage maximum attendance. After that, attendance can be dramatically lower because it does not affect the school’s payments.
Clearly, we need reforms to restore the traditional work ethic. And it can be done. Just imagine a reform movement that insists:1. You should only get disability if you really deserve it.
2. You should only get paid if you actually work.
3. Teachers who can’t be allowed near students should be removed from the payroll.
4. Every teacher should report actual attendance electronically every hour (a method McDonald’s uses to report every sale in its 37,000 stores worldwide), and schools will only get paid for students who actually attend class.
Think what would happen if these kinds of reforms spread throughout the entire economy—once again, we would live by “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.”
One thing’s for sure: these reforms would provoke bitter resistance from those members of the machine who profit from the status quo. Their source of income might be called cheating or extortion (like New York’s rubber-room teachers); it might even be considered theft in some cases (such as lying to get disability or workmen’s comp). But they consider it “their” money, and they think they’re entitled to it.
The people who live off your taxes without doing an honest day’s work understand exactly what they’re doing. They are beating the system. And if you advocate reforms that threaten their lifestyle, they’ll try to beat you, too.
2. Productivity Versus Union Work Rules and Bureaucracy
From the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to victory over Japan in August 1945, America won World War II in three years and eight months. That’s the traditional, can-do America.
In contrast, it recently took twenty-three years to add a fifth run-way to the Atlanta airport. More strikingly, we still have not rebuilt the World Trade Center more than eight years after it was destroyed. That’s bureaucratic America.
The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, understood the danger of paralysis posed by a unionized, bureaucratic government. In 1937, he explained how government employee unions must be held to a different standard than private ones: All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. . . . The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.5
Unfortunately, FDR’s Democratic descendants have ignored his wise counsel. Today, can-do America is being steadily eroded by its bureaucratic counterpart. America is now so tied up in regulations, litigation, and bureaucratic rules that key sectors of our economy—especially energy exploration—are becoming stagnant.
Consider New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who continually laments America’s inability to match China’s speed in developing large-scale projects. Yet, he cannot understand that the U.S. government bureaucracies he admires and the liberal policies he supports are the very heart of the problem.
For example, President Obama needed emergency stimulus money so fast that no one in Congress had time to read the $787 billion stimulus bill. Then that legislation met the federal bureaucracy. Consider the example of “fast track” green energy projects which, despite their name, still have to go through a multi-layered environmental impact and public review process. According to the website of the Bureau of Land Management (which handles green energy projects for the Department of the Interior), these projects could “potentially” be cleared for approval to receive stimulus funds by December 2010, almost two years after the stimulus was passed.
Still, Friedman is correct that China is developing quickly. When my wife Callista and I were in China in August 2009, it was clear the Chinese were heavily investing in building the world’s largest and most efficient high-speed train system. They are determined to connect all their major cities with 215-mile-per-hour trains.6
That project will allow the Chinese to save energy, improve the environment, and dominate the world’s high-speed train market with the most advanced manufacturing in the world. They have an investment strategy rather than a stimulus strategy. They focus on getting the job done, rather than on following bureaucratic red tape.
We could apply the same technology in the Boston-Washington corridor or along the Florida and California coastlines, but the combination of union work rules, land use studies, bureaucratic red tape, and the likelihood of litigation bottles everything up, keeping Americans trapped in obsolete, slower trains—even Amtrak’s high-tech Acela is outdated by the new Chinese standards.
Similarly, the United States has enormous amounts of energy reserves.a However, American energy is trapped by litigation, regulation, and hostile bureaucracies. Even w
hen a decision is made to open up federal land for natural gas exploration, bureaucrats slow down the permitting process. Then, when the permits are finally issued, left-wing environmental groups file lawsuits. The Left’s goal is to exhaust the time and money of potential energy producers so they will develop foreign resources instead of American ones. The result is a government-created energy scarcity that increases prices, drives jobs abroad, and hurts our balance of payments.
Again and again the process of studying, organizing, preparing, and then regulating and litigating adds months, years, and even decades to critical American initiatives.
Yet, the secular-socialist machine will resist any effort to bring back America’s traditional can-do attitude, which would reduce the machine’s power. The Left have spent decades building a trap of bureaucracy, union work rules, and litigation to erode the independent, competitive, and productive instincts of the American people. And they will not relinquish their system without a fight.
3. Elected Representation Versus Bureaucrats and Judges
Elected representation is the heart of the American political system.
Since our Declaration of Independence in 1776 proclaimed that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights—among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” we Americans have believed we have been entrusted by God with rights that no politician, bureaucrat, or judge can revoke.
This concept of freedom came to Americans during our long, bitter dispute with the British Empire, its London bureaucracy, and its imperial and dictatorial judges. Our forefathers believed ultimate power should always reside in the people, who would loan power to elected officials and who could reclaim it from them if necessary.
The government was viewed as a servant of the people, not the other way around. New Hampshire’s state motto, “Live free or die,” was typical of the intensity with which Americans guarded their natural-born rights.
Characteristically, one of the first acts of the first Congress was to pass a Bill of Rights that strictly limited the power of government. The First Amendment protects the right to free speech and also prevents the government from trying to control religion.
The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms—something that is not understood by many politicians today who confuse it with the right to hunt ducks, as President Clinton once did. The Founding Fathers knew better. The British were stopped at Lexington and Concord by a well-trained and well-armed local militia. The American right to bear arms turned out to be the key to retaining all other rights in the face of tyranny.
Secular socialists believe it’s the government’s right, and even its duty, to change the people—to make them more progressive, more secular, and more “tolerant.” Thomas Jefferson believed so deeply in the opposite proposition—that it’s the people’s right to change their government—that he declared every generation might need its own revolution. He was speaking about a peaceful, democratic revolution, and he proved his seriousness in 1800 when a political party he helped to create, the Democratic-Republican Party, swept away the establishment and took control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.
For the first 100 years of American self-government, elected officials dominated relatively small, politically appointed bureaucracies. The Jeffersonians completely reshaped government after their 1800 victory, abolishing over half of all sitting federal judges—eighteen of thirty-five. A generation later, Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 led to a “spoils system” in which the winning candidate could dramatically reshape the bureaucracy by packing it with his supporters. And at the beginning of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln regarded one of his most important tasks to be appointing people to federal jobs. He believed the bureaucracy had to be changed to heed the will of the people as expressed through their choice of elected officials.
One occasion when unelected officials tried to impose their views on the country was the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. Extending slavery to the entire country, the decision was a major cause of Lincoln’s reentry into politics, and it sparked the rise of a Republican Party that split the nation and led to our most devastating conflict—the Civil War.
After a century of subservience to elected representatives, the bureaucracy began accumulating power in the 1880s, when the rising professional class produced a civil service movement that aimed to modernize government. The Progressives, as they were called, believed well-educated professional bureaucrats were more capable than elected officials of rendering “correct” judgments. This view, derived from the snobbish elitism of the professional classes, gradually came to dominate our bureaucracies, courts, and our universities, leading to a much bigger, more dominating federal bureaucracy.
Today, we have moved from a world of decisive elected officials to a world of elected officials being limited and trapped by red tape, litigation, bureaucrats, and lawyers. And the American people know it. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed only 21 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.7
Much of the current anger at the political establishment resembles the righteous rage Andrew Jackson and his allies felt while fighting to clean up what they perceived to be an oligarchy trying to impose a corrupt, Washington-centered, elitist system on the American people.
“I weep for the liberty of my country,” said Jackson, “when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.”
Today, the tea party movement, the explosion of insurgent primary challengers, the general anger at Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and all the other centers of unionized bureaucratic power—all these elements are coming together to force a fundamental choice in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tradition: will the American people continue to select representatives to whom we loan power? Or will America become a European-style country in which the permanent bureaucrats and permanent judges decide virtually everything, while the politicians merely play partisan games to entertain the public and satisfy their own ambitions?
The people’s fight to take back power from the bureaucracy is a fight all the Founders would support. With Bill Forstchen and Steve Hanser, I recently completed two novels on George Washington and the American Revolution. When you immerse yourself in the stories of people who fought to create this country, you realize how passionately they believed in liberty. They really did risk everything—their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor—to give us a free country. And they fought for eight long years.
At Gettysburg, commemorating the first national military cemetery, Lincoln observed that Americans were involved in a great struggle to decide if we will have “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He was prepared to fight our bloodiest war—620,000 Americans killed—to ensure the continuation of this Union where people lent power to those they elected.
Now we will discover if we have the same commitment to America that Washington and Lincoln had, the same willingness to endure, and the same courage to stand for our beliefs.
4. Honesty Versus Corruption
Historically, America’s insistence on the rule of law and honest government has contrasted sharply with the tradition—and even acceptance—of corruption and dishonesty around the world.
America, of course, has had corrupt episodes—look at the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City during the 1800s, or the Democratic machine that dominates Chicago to this day. But the American people have never tolerated corruption—we’ve consistently tried to clean it up as soon as we learn of it, lock up the crooks, and maintain a standard of honesty.
Part of this attitude stems from the religious core of the American experience. “Thou shalt not steal,” the Eighth Commandment God gave Moses during the exodus from Egypt, is an injunction taken seriously throughout American history. Furthermore, if we were “endowed by
our Creator with certain unalienable rights,” then stealing someone’s endowment is an offense against the Creator. Finally, if we’re all born with equal rights, then theft by one diminishes the rights of another.
Americans have also understood that honesty is the key underpinning of the free market. If people trust you, they’re more likely to undertake bigger projects and take bigger risks with you.
The American belief that honesty is the key to a successful free market drew much of its inspiration from two very different men. The first was in some ways the first modern American—Benjamin Franklin. As a successful businessman, social entrepreneur, scientist, and politician, Franklin understood the importance of hard work, honesty, frugality, and of opposing corruption. His writings in the Almanac and in his autobiography show he was a prototypical self-made man.
The second champion of honesty was a Scottish intellectual, Adam Smith, who wrote two introductions to free-market theory. The first, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, outlines the importance of honesty and conscience in living the good life. His classic work arguing for free enterprise, The Wealth of Nations, was published in 1776, the same year as our Declaration of Independence. Note that moral philosophy came first and free markets second in Smith’s writing.
Smith and his fellow writers of the Scottish Enlightenment strongly influenced the Founding Fathers. In fact, one of the most famous phrases from the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson’s reference to “the pursuit of happiness”—was borrowed from the Scottish Enlightenment. In that context it meant “virtue and wisdom,” not “hedonism and acquisition” as it’s often interpreted today.
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