N o matter how much Barack Obama blathers about change and John McCain boasts of straight talk, neither could be elected if he espoused traditional values such as self-reliance and personal responsibility. Imagine either candidate saying to the voters:
» 1. It is not the responsibility of your fellow citizens to buy health insurance for you and your family. They have enough of a burden paying their own bills. If you don’t have health insurance because you’re unemployed, then get a job. If your employer doesn’t provide health insurance, buy it. Low-cost policies are available; in the Washington area, a family of four can be insured for as little as $154 a month.
One of the main reasons health care is so expensive now is because so much of it — e.g., Medicare and Medicaid — is paid for by taxpayers. The system can only get worse by making all 300 million Americans patients of the government. Besides, do you really want your health care in the hands of the same people who manage the Postal Service and the Transportation Security Administration?
» 2. “Diversity is our strength” has become a dangerous mantra. Diversity will destroy us unless we start insisting that those who come here to take advantage of our prosperity also assimilate to our culture. It does not matter if citizens are different colors; it matters mightily when they have opposing values. Look at what has happened in Western Europe due to growing Muslim populations. The Archbishop of Canterbury said earlier this year that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia (Islamic law) in the United Kingdom now “seems unavoidable.”
The only way the United States can protect itself from such inevitable chaos is to severely limit immigration from Muslim countries — and withstand the caterwauling about bigotry. Western democratic values are fundamentally incompatible with some of the tenets of Islamic law. Muslims who do not believe in the equality of men and women, secular government, or freedom of speech are never going to embrace American values, and their presence can only weaken our culture.
» 3. There is no relationship between the amount of money spent on schools and the quality of education. For example, Washington, D.C., ranks third in per-pupil expenditure yet has one of the worst school systems in the country. The crucial determinant of student achievement is the competence of teachers, and paying higher salaries to bad teachers doesn’t solve the problem.
The answer is to make it more difficult to become a teacher so that the profession will regain its prestige. If the certification test to become a teacher were as difficult as those certifying accountants or architects, education could no longer be a default major for the poorest-performing college students.
» 4. As economist Robert Samuelson recently pointed out, the United States faces a crisis that will become a catastrophe if we don’t take immediate steps. By 2050, one fifth of the population will be older than 65, and while the entire U.S. population may exceed 430 million, about four-fifths of that increase will reflect immigrants, their children and their grandchildren. “The potential for conflict is obvious,” Samuelson said. “Older retirees and younger and poorer immigrants — heavily Hispanic — will compete for government social services and benefits. Squeezed in between will be middle-class and middle-age workers, facing higher taxes.”
Therefore, we must reform both Social Security and immigration policy before our nation collapses under the weight of both.
» 5. It is not the government’s responsibility to take care of you from cradle to grave. If you have shelter, food, medical care and access to education, you are not poor. Indeed, by the standards of most of the rest of the world, you are very wealthy. So long as welfare mothers can afford manicures, hair weaves and cell phones, it is ridiculous to talk about confiscating more from the wages of productive people to give to those who aren’t.
These are among the critical facts our nation should be discussing, but it is a safe bet that neither Obama nor McCain will dare acknowledge them. They know that a campaign focused on such matters would end with the words, “I congratulate my opponent.”
