There’s an essay in the Washington Post, that wonders if we face America’s new culture war: Free enterprise vs. government control. Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, considers the topic and concludes that we do face such a cultural clash.
First, Brooks considers the irreconcilable systems of free enterprise and state control:
This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion.
Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.
It is not at all clear which side will prevail. The forces of big government are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration’s money and influence. Our leaders in Washington, aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. If these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise nation.
I call this a culture war because free enterprise has been integral to American culture from the beginning, and it still lies at the core of our history and character. “A wise and frugal government,” Thomas Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address in 1801, “which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
He later warned: “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” In other words, beware government’s economic control, and woe betide the redistributors.
Now, as then, entrepreneurship can flourish only in a culture where individuals are willing to innovate and exert leadership; where people enjoy the rewards and face the consequences of their decisions; and where we can gamble the security of the status quo for a chance of future success.
Most Americans, a large majority, support the free enterprise system. Advocates of this system have hard work ahead, though, as a financial crisis brought about through wrong-headed regulation has become an excuse to impose still more regulation. The challenge to a productive and prosperous America is considerable:
The 70 percent majority [favoring free enterprise], meanwhile, believes that ingenuity and hard work should be rewarded. We admire creative entrepreneurs and disdain rule-making bureaucrats. We know that income inequality by itself is not what makes people unhappy, and that only earned success can make them happy.
We must do more to show that while we use the language of commerce and business, we believe in human flourishing and contentment. We must articulate moral principles that set forth our fundamental values, and we must be prepared to defend them.
I have no doubt — none at all — that free market principles are morally and prudently superior to state control. This is a culture war that, in the end, cannot be lost. Planning and spending schemes are destined to fall behind private initiatives.
Even in small-town Whitewater, our latest multi-million dollar project is innovative only in crafting brazen and empty claims for historic accomplishment, limitless possibilities, a cure for the common cold, etc. Projects like that, funded with taxpayers’ earnings and municipal debt, are destined to be remembered only as over-hyped failures.
There is no better time to be, happily committed, to the free-enterprise side of this culture war.