Last week, just prior to his meeting with leaders from all of the G20 countries, President George Bush spoke to a group of businessmen and women at the Federal Hall National Memorial in New York City about the economy.
Here’s a part of what he said, “While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the long-term solution to today’s problems is sustained economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free markets and free people.
“In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure…but the crisis was not a failure of the free market system. And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems that we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to all across the globe.”
It wasn’t until I read his statement that I realized how far off track we’ve allowed ourselves to be led from principles of good government. The free market is not an economic system – the key word being system. President Bush is confusing the free market with capitalism which is a system. Real conservatives believe in free markets; they also see the value in capitalism until that value proposition begins to change, as it always does with systems.
Part of the problem today is that we’ve personalized what shouldn’t be personal (our government) and governmentized what shouldn’t be public (our freedom). Government should be our objective referee in behalf of a level playing field, and our freedom should be wholly a function of our personal virtues. When we confuse the two – when we treat government as the creator of our virtues and look to freedom as the creator of a level playing field – we get into deep, deep trouble. When we confuse the two we start to confuse other things like the free market and capitalism.
Contrary to the Obama crowd, the current financial crisis isn’t a failure of the free market; it’s a failure of we, the people, to embrace freedom. Freedom never fails – and it won’t because it’s not a system…and by “system” I mean an ordered arrangement. Communism is a system…Fascism is a system…Nazism is a system…and Capitalism is a system. A crisis is caused when we use our freedom to embrace systems, most often systems that promise security.
One of the great ironies of life is that freedom breeds prosperity, and prosperity breeds an unhealthy obsession with security – we don’t want lose what we have and that fear leads us to value security more than freedom. For some people, the thought of losing what they have drives them to ever-greater heights of innovation and greater levels of freedom. Those people understand the power of freedom. For the rest of us, having stuff drives us to perversely covet more of what we have.
So let’s get back to today’s headlines. What good is it to bail out General Motors? Do we really believe it will bravely innovate through a government bailout? Let’s face it, they want to keep what they have. The Big Shots make big money and the union workers are secure. More money won’t help them see that their real problem is that what they make isn’t good enough any more. Its competitors are making better cars at less expense. If we really want American car companies to succeed, then we’d use this opportunity to help them rethink how they do business. GM would do far better in bankruptcy than bailout.
Here’s my concern: why do we think that more of what gave us the problem to begin with will solve the problem now? Ronald Reagan, the last politician of note who understood freedom, said, “Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem.”
Government is no less of a problem if it aids capitalism than when it’s used to promote communism. The answers to our economic woes have always been within each of us as long as we truly believe in the merits of freedom. When we prosper, and go soft, we seem to forget who brung us to the dance.
I’m Paul Mero. Thanks for listening.
