When I took my high school civics course, the teacher omitted one of the most important lessons: There’s no “free” lunch, and the biggest prices for free lunches come when they are served up by government. Those free lunches are seductive and hard to turn down, but the price is paid in growing increments of your freedom.
Mark Steyn, author of the classic America Alone, and a writer whose column appears in The Bulletin, makes this point brilliantly in a lecture prepared for Hillsdale College and reprinted in its publication, Imprimis. He writes that when he first moved to New Hampshire, he thought its motto, “Live free or die!” was formulated right before a battle to fire the troops up. Then he found that Gen. John Stark, a hero of the American Revolution, made that statement decades after battle in a letter explaining why he could not attend a dinner.
Due to health problems, he could not attend the 32nd reunion of the Battle of Bennington, but in his letter he formulated the motto, “Live free or die; Death is not the worst of evils.” The shorter version survived to become the state motto of New Hampshire.
Mr. Steyn said he found that was even more impressive and important coming at such a time long after battle. He reasoned it is easy to be prepared to battle for freedom in extreme times, but it is equally important to be so prepared at all other times: “It’s a bold statement of the reality of our lives in the prosperous West. You can live as free men, but if you choose not to, your society will soon die.”
In the same vein, he says everyone assumes his book America Alone is about radical Islam. He writes people assume it’s about “firebreathing imams, the excitable young men jumping up and down in the street doing the old ‘Death to the Great Satan’ dance. It’s not. It’s about us. It’s about a possibly terminal manifestation of an old civilizational temptation: Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic.”
You might say that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and indolence is the formula for loss of that freedom.
Mr. Steyn discusses what can kill our republic, and it is an enemy within … our own indolence and our lack of commitment to the motto “Live free or die!” He does this in an article in one of my favorite publications, Imprimis (April 2009). It’s a free, monthly publication but 10 times as valuable as most of the mainstream media such as The New York Times. (Call 800-437-2268 for a free subscription.)
Mr. Steyn started figuring this out when he ran into trouble in Canada with their so-called “human rights” commissions that accused his writings of being Islamophobic. He said he could not understand how, in this matter, the progressive left was making common cause with radical Islam. But then he realized what the two groups have in common overrides any seeming superficial differences:
“Big government progressives and political Islam recoil from the concept of the citizen, of the free individual entrusted to operate within his own societal space, assume his responsibilities and exploit his potential.”
In most of the developed West, the citizen is losing his autonomy. The state is slowly taking over all of the responsibilities of the citizen — health care, child care, care of the elderly, etc. — “to the point where it’s effectively severed its citizens from humanity’s primal instincts, not least the survival instinct.”
Europe’s addiction to big government, unaffordable entitlements, cradle-to-grave welfare and a dependence on mass immigration is leading to its extinction. Now the U.S. is starting down the same road. President Barack Obama is giving the U.S. what has virtually destroyed Europe. He’s giving us big government, big taxes, unprecedented budgets, unsustainable deficits and national debt, and a welfare explosion with health care on the way and universal college education at government expense.
There are many problems with the European/Obama approach. The math just doesn’t add up. It is unsustainable. In Sweden, state spending amounts to 54 percent of GDP. In America we’re already up to 40 percent and, in four years, we’ll be approaching Sweden.
Incidentally, after the greatest, most undisciplined spending splurge in American history, President Obama recently said our spending, deficits and debt is unsustainable. He runs up more debt than all 43 previous presidents combined. And only then the Messiah Obama has figured out our spending is unsustainable. Now, all he has to figure out is who is responsible for all that spending — none other than Barack Hussein Obama.
But Mr. Steyn argues it’s not just the spending, the deficits, the debt, the out-of-control budgets and the financial statement of the nation that is the worst part of the problem. He said even if someone would write a check for all that spending, the damage would still be done: “Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. That’s the stage Europe’s at.”
We’re in a deep financial hole, losing our financial health, but more importantly, we’re in the process of surrendering our freedom and liberty to a big brother state. As government expands, freedom contracts. Big government provides a certain comfort to citizens, but it comes at an unacceptable price of loss of freedom.
Mr. Steyn points to the George Mason University survey of freedom in the U.S. The five least free states are Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey and the least free state, New York. Like the U.S., New York is in a financial hole and doesn’t know how to get out of it. So what does Gov. David Paterson of New York do to get out of the hole? He comes up with the biggest tax increase in New York history. He’s adopting the Obama strategy of assuming you can spend your way out of excessive spending by more spending.
Stage One: Your Worries Disappear With Your Freedom
There are various stages to Machiavelli’s “indolence.” The first stage comes when the government comes out with every program needed to make all your worries disappear — about your mortgage, your health, care of the elderly and everything else. As government moves in, there are strings attached. Once it gives banks or car companies money, it gets involved with many aspects of their business. The same for citizens.
Once it provides health care, it reasons if it controls your health care, it should have a say in all the things that determine your health. For example, in Britain, the obese are not entitled to hip and knee replacements. There are all kinds of such rules and all kinds of inconsistencies in such rules about life style choices and right to care. But as Mr. Steyn explains it, “Tyranny is always whimsical.”
Stage Two: Government’s Gifts Come With Strings Attached
What we’ve just described is that government’s beneficence comes with commands. In Britain, to save the planet, there is an extra tax on each trip beyond one a citizen makes. This really sounds like the way the Soviet’s controlled movement through requirements of exit visas. Now the British are doing that with exit taxes. In stage two, the state starts regulating your behavior.
There’s more and more of this regulation of behavior as citizens become wards of the state, with provision of their health, their education, their housing, etc.
Stage Three: Once Transformed To Wards Of The State, Government Regulates What You Think
Stage three comes when having made citizens wards of the state; there is an attempt to regulate not only what you do, but also what they think. In Canada, the government keeps foreign newspapers, foreign television operators and foreign bookstores out of Canada. And then it assumes that it has a right to police the ideas disseminated by the local newspapers, broadcasters and bookstores they allow to operate.
Stage Four: Big Brother Tells You What Not To Think
Then comes stage four, in which dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as “hatred.” In Britain, an author interviewed on BBC politely expressed concerns about gay adoption. He was investigated by Scotland Yard’s Community Safety Unit for Homophobic, Racist and Domestic Incidents. Mr. Steyn gives other examples that include the arrest and jailing of a Daily Telegraph columnist for a joke in a speech.
Mr. Steyn summarizes how government expansion leads to freedom contraction in places like England, Canada and even the U.S. He writes:
“The massive expansion of government under the laughable euphemism of ‘stimulus’ (Stage One) comes with a quid pro quo down the line (Stage Two): Once you accept you’re a child in a government nursery, why shouldn’t Nanny tell you what to do? And then — Stage Three — what to think? And — Stage Four — what you’re forbidden to think …”
Stage Five: The Descent Into Torpor And Triviality: The End Of Excellence And Achievement
And then comes Stage Five, the final stage. That’s where Europe is. It is producing nothing of excellence. No great science or great art. That’s still found in America. Europe isn’t even producing enough families to maintain its population. It is shrinking in population, productivity, power and seems on its way to extinction. Charles Murray, author of In Our Hands, explains this development: “Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor. When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”
Mr. Steyn explains it this way: When the state “gives” you everything, it’s not surprising that citizens stop functioning as adults and life becomes an extended adolescence. Gerald Ford said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.”
Now in Europe, the reality is that a government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s where Europe is. The European model welfare state is unsustainable, but government can’t get its citizens to cut back. These countries can’t fix the situation they’re in and are heading for collapse.
America can still avoid the fate of Europe and get off the track it is on. Mr. Steyn writes: “They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea — of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest — or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible.”
Gen. Stark was right when he said, “Live free or die.” We have to decide whether or not we want to live free or continue on the path we’re now on to big government and shrinking liberty and freedom. The free lunch may seem delicious, but it is the most poisonous food a free society serves up. Those free lunches are toxic to freedom.
WRITTEN by Herb Denenberg at The Bulletin, Philadelphia's family newspaper, on May 19th, 2009
