Helping Individuals = Having Faith in Them

Going off my last post, here’s some more food for thought: For as much as care and compassion for the individual are what drive some people to enthusiastically support the progressive ideology, it’s shocking to realize how much liberalism doesn’t suggest the importance of government having faith in people. Let me explain:

As is generally the norm in academia, the vast majority of my teachers and professors growing up were fairly liberal in their political opinions. Whenever it came time to learn about the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution in both Victorian Era-Britian and the post-Civil War United States, my teachers and professors have suggested that the assembly lines and horrible working conditions they feel defined that era are still a major problem today, that capitalism has “done this to people.” In short, they believe the industrial world and capitalism in general have alienated people from their work and turned them into robots. They believe the lower classes were and still are enslaved by capitalism.

Maybe there’s some truth to what they have to say about that era. Honestly, even as conservative as I am, I can’t watch movies like “Newsies” or Elizabeth Gaskill’s “North and South” without feeling some compassion for the working classes of Industrial nations during this period. Maybe there’s something to be said for the horrible working conditions and for the incredibly large gap between the lifestyles of the oil, banking, and railroad tycoons of that era. Maybe, my political opinions would have been different had I lived then. Maybe things like minimum wage laws and FDR’s New Deal, which were intended to fill in the “holes of capitalism” and were once a necessity, have simply been taken too far and the pendulum has swung the other way.

Even if history is as horrible as they report it to be, however, I at least have to conclude that history (at least in this context) is a pendulum that has swung the other way. Why? Because believing that people today need to be empowered as individuals does not hold water with contemporary liberal rhetoric, which suggests people cannot be trusted as individuals. I can think of three policy-areas that support this:

1) Gun Control—When I discuss my support for the Second Amendment with my left-leaning friends, they can’t seem to fathom the idea of an adult carrying a concealed weapon around, for the purpose of self-defense, especially in a public place like a school or a restaurant. They object to the idea of teachers and administrators carrying guns (even if they hold the necessary concealed carry permit), saying that if a teacher ever lost his or her temper in class, they would pull out the gun and shoot a student. What my friends don’t understand is that responsible adults with concealed weapons and the legal permits to carry them are just that: responsible. After going through all the safety training to learn how to shoot a gun and the necessary background checks, they’re not going to suddenly blow a gasket and forfeit their ability to defend themselves. They’re not going to use a gun in public, unless they honestly feel they’re life is at stake. But my liberal friends would rather put an unreasonable amount of a pressure on the police force to be at every crime scene than show a little faith in ordinary people; time and time again, the latter has proved far more effective. As the saying goes, “when seconds count, the police are minutes away.”

2) Education—My liberal friends continue to be shocked when I tell them we need market-based solutions, such as vouchers, in order to improve education in this country. They say that education is too important a priority to leave to the unstable forces of capitalism. The way my friends and many other liberals care about educating kids and preparing them for the future is admirable; their logic, however, is flawed. Essentially, they believe that if we keep dumping more and more money into public education, eventually kids will be educated. In other words, they would rather have faith in the collective system of government than in individual people—in more teachers to get their act together because they know they’ll be held accountable for their performance and the performance of their students; in parents to make responsible choices as to how their kids will be educated; and in kids to learn effectively when pushed to work harder and rewarded for their efforts.

3) Economic Prosperity—Finally, as I’ve asserted before, many of my friends are adamant that the poor in this country need the security blanket of welfare and other social programs. Just like their position on education, they believe that food and shelter are too important to leave to the forces of capitalism. I would argue that freedom and prosperity, and the food and shelter that come along with them, are too important to leave to the overreaching hand of government bureaucracy that more often than not does not help people in the end and that creates a culture of dependency.

The motives of my left-leaning friends in all of these positions are admirable. In a spiritual and moral sense, I wish I were more like them. However, if these liberals really wanted to “empower” and “free” ordinary people, they would realize that government needs to get out of the way. The verb empower suggests giving power to others. Yet that is the last thing that many liberal policies end up doing, regardless of whether hording power for themselves and creating a “nanny-state” of government is the goal that most liberals have in mind. And trust me, I’m inclined to give most of them the benefit of the doubt here.

Stranger than "Atlas Shrugged"

Ever see that movie “Stranger than Fiction”? The main character (played by Will Ferrell) is going along living his life when all the sudden he hears a women’s voice narrating everything he does. He later finds out that he’s actually a character in the book she’s writing. Well, I may not be hearing voices or anything, but it sure feels like I’m in a book sometimes, especially as a conservative. The country, the world, the economy, etc. are all starting to look like the world of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged." And it’s not just because the economy is going under and jobs are disappearing, but it’s because liberal elitists in this country are pushing more than ever the idea that self-interest and selfishness are the same thing. And sadly, many of my friends are accepting this.

Sitting around with some of my co-workers (who also happen to be young college students) a few months ago, we were talking about this very subject. They were railing on capitalism and saying that greed and selfishness had caused it, as if it were a plague. They were saying how evil capitalism was, and I interrupted one of my friends to point out that in virtually everything she had already done that day she had interacted with and benefitted from capitalism—from the clothes and shoes she was wearing and the books she was studying to the building she was sitting in. I couldn’t believe what she said next: “Well that’s the crappy (she actually said something else, but I won’t repeat it here) part about it; you can’t get away from it.” I was stunned. Most of my liberal friends get pretty mad when I insinuate that they are anti-capitalism. Usually, they’ll say something like, “I just think humanity and compassion needs to be a bigger part of the conversation when it comes to social policy.” They’ll usually back down and refrain from admitting they are against capitalism, whether they are or not. I guess I at least have to respect my friend’s honesty here. It’s just sad to watch so many people accept this.

Contrary to what they may think, Self-Interest is actually a good and righteous thing. It is a good and righteous idea that people are and should be responsible for their own physical survival and improvement. Individual people know what is best for them in all aspects of life. Sure, freedom and responsibility come with challenges, some of them very difficult. But, the principle of doing what is best for yourself and consequently of knowing that you have a significant amount of control over your life is empowering, in the long run. It’s not something you should have to apologize for.

I should never have to apologize for paying for and enjoying a sandwich from subway or loving the feel of newly purchased shoes or enjoying riding around in a new car. All by themselves, these are good things that far from being condemned (simply because some people don’t accept the responsibility that comes with freedom and choose to either pay for things they can’t afford or make materialism too high of a priority) should actually be celebrated on their own merits. We should celebrate the fact that as Americans we do have control over our lives and destinies.

Again, self-interest is not selfishness. In fact, people generally categorized as selfish in our culture, who in this context are absorbed in immediate material gratification and who sometimes ditch their faith or families for worldly pursuits, are not doing what’s in their own self-interest.

I have no moral qualms over condemning material excess or suggesting that people have a duty to help the poor monetarily. My faith and even my, contrary to popular belief, political ideology support this. So, why won’t more of my friends stand up for the principle of self-interest? It’s a principle that they utilize on daily basis and, more than they probably want to admit, actually enjoy the freedom to do so. The fact that anybody should even have to explain such basic economics, such basic principles that our country was built on and that have made America and the rest of the world great since then is pretty sad. It does indeed make our current world stranger than the fictional world of Atlas Shrugged. It’s stranger because we’re actually seeing these ideas played out in our own non-fictional world today.