When the President announced a federal government shutdown had been averted, he noted it was “a debate about spending cuts, not social issues.”
But a spending cut is a social issue. So are spending increases, tax rates, forms of taxation, and manner of regulation. These are the rules that allow, or preclude, entrepreneurs from building the American dream and creating more jobs.
Too often, we as defenders of free enterprise forget to communicate that how we spend and collect the fruits of Americans’ labor and redistribute it to others are key social issues. Indeed, they are moral issues. We get lost in dry conversations about cutting tax rates for one group or another. We wring our hands about regulations that are important but don’t immediately connect with the average American just trying to feed his or her family.
What better definition can one have of “social” than one that affects all our people? And there are no issues that touch on more people than the economic rules that guide our daily choices to work more (or less), save more (or less), and start a business (or not).
If Obama is off on his definition of social issues, consider this simple test of our moral progress proffered by many liberals’ other favorite president, the character of Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing: “If fidelity to freedom of democracy is the code of our civic religion then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received.”
So imagine, briefly, the life of a child today and decide if our economic rules meet our moral obligation to provide a better future for our forthcoming generations.
Thanks to dithering by politicians, our example child is born into a world in which every citizen already owes the federal government nearly $46,000. Republicans in Congress have pointed out that:
when children born today reach 40 years old, their share of the U.S. public debt will be $279,738—an increase of 859 percent above what it is today. For a family of four, the total household debt share would be approximately $1.119 million.
She will walk into a school that spends too much to teach too little, with the failing educational system in Washington, D.C. spending as much as $25,000 to educate each pupil.
Upon completing the preferred level of education, our child can choose whether to enter the government bureaucracy that pays as much as 40 percent more than private sector work. And who could blame her? It is our tax and spending structure that has set up a perverse incentive to drain talent out of the private sector and continually increase the size, scope, and cost of government until our long-term obligations to public servants sink the ship.
Should our hypothetical child choose to enter the private sector, she gets the “opportunity” to pay more in taxes the more successful she becomes. The burden for all federal expenditures increasingly falls on her, as she becomes one of only half of working Americans to pay federal tax. That half pays one-third of all wages in the U.S. in the form of “social welfare” payments.
And should our imaginary child end up successful, she may well see most of his life’s work taken by the Treasury in the form of the Death Tax, which looms large pending the next real budget deal.
So as Obama and other national leaders attempt to break out “social issues” from economic issues, it’s important to remember that free enterprise is a moral choice and defenders of free enterprise must continue to take that message to American voters.
After all, we had our own favorite president by the name of Ronald Reagan who reminded us: “The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.”
Brett McMahon is vice president of Miller & Long Concrete Construction and a spokesman for HaltTheAssault.com
