(Andrew Horning is a candidate for the LPIN’s 2012 US Senate Nomination. View his website here.)
That’s the question I hear the most: “What are you going to do for me?” But let me ask you; what have politicians done for you so far?
In his 1961 inaugural address, JFK ordered an about-face from the New Deal when he said, “…ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” He then pushed for the biggest tax cut in history. The great orator, abolitionist, statesman and former slave Frederick Douglass said, “Do nothing with us, or by us, as a particular class. We now simply ask to be allowed to do for ourselves.” Our “Founding Fathers” created a nation that had the simplest, thriftiest, most minimal government on earth, and this nation flourished like no other in history. Why did people ask less and get more back then? Why are we failing now? It’s simple. The people who win power with promises are not the ones who help you every day.
Politicians don’t make the discoveries that make our lives safer, longer, and more comfortable. Free-market, free-thinking artisans, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs do that. Government doesn’t build cars, nice houses and stylish shoes. It doesn’t make espresso, or bicycle helmets, or leather sofas, or medicines. It doesn’t make jumbo jets, computers or portable DVD players. Private businesses are launching spacecraft and building global telecom systems. Doctors can, without political intervention, open up a failing human body, replace the heart, and allow a life to go on.
Yet we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that without government, there’d be no roads. Some of us think that without government subsidies, there’d be no football, no art, no charity, no business. While we don’t utter it anymore, there is a name for this thinking. We used to call it socialism, and Americans used to fight it. Now we whimper and beg for it; and we’re getting it good and hard.
So, you want to know what I’ll do for you?
Perhaps you call it “Spring Cleaning” when you look around, get disgusted with what you see, and purge your environment of anything that doesn’t suit you. It’s called good business when companies consolidate, drop ancillary operations and focus on core business. Whatever you call it, I will apply this wisdom to government again. It’s worked every time we’ve tried it, and it works to the benefit of all. That sounds like a fair deal to me.