Barack Obama has said, “It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper — that makes this country work.”
Oh, really? Says who?
America is the most economically prosperous society in human history — by far. Yet our academic, media, and political leaders relentlessly criticize us. On the one hand, most of them say it’s good that we’re prosperous. But they also insist we need to aspire to something greater. They never specify exactly what “greater” means. Usually they come up with something like: “Our prosperity must have a purpose.” (This was actually a George W. Bush line; not Obama’s.)
First of all, the notion of prosperity without a purpose is a contradiction in terms. Even a low-level employee can’t earn a simple paycheck without the sense of purpose required to get up each day, go to work, and do a minimally competent job. Nor do you build a successful computer software company without purpose or goals. One purpose might be to make money; but true success is usually motivated by other things as well, such as a quest for excellence.
The nation’s overall prosperity is the sum total of many different individual purposes—great and small.
Money and excellence, however, are not the “purpose” towards which today’s leaders want us to aim. They want us to move away from self-interested, individual purpose and towards collective purpose.
Collective purpose means selfless purpose. This is Obama’s ideology, and he means it. That’s the problem. If today’s political and intellectual leaders spoke in unequivocal terms, they would say: “Continue being prosperous. But do it for society, not for yourselves. Do it for the common good, not for your own individual good.”
Try to project what living for “the common good,” instead of your own self-interested good, would mean in practice. Imagine, first, the psychological implications.
You start your day. You try to motivate yourself to get moving. You say to yourself: “I must work today. But I must do it for everybody in the world. I must do it for the poor and the less well off; I must get moving for them, not for me. I must even do it, in some cases, for someone who is better off than me, but has a need in some particular area. For example, the young man down the street whose parents are very well off, but don’t want to pay for his graduate school. He needs graduate school, and somebody has to pay for it. Or that girl next door who wants to be a singer. I must help them all. How? By working harder. That way, I will fall into a higher tax bracket.”
You go on: “When I fall into a higher tax bracket, then the government will have even more money to spread around to those whom they judge as in need. This is my true purpose; not to take care of my family, or myself (though it’s certainly fine to keep what the government says is OK for me to keep—as long as I’m not “selfish” and don’t demand to keep it all, or even most of it). My purpose in working today cannot be to build that addition on my house, or to purchase that second car. My purpose, rather, is to make sure that everybody in the country has a car. My purpose is not to make sure I can afford that cruise I want to take. But rather, my purpose is to make sure that the government can launch new environmental initiatives to protect animals they think are cute and cuddly. My purpose is not to hire a tutor to make sure my own child really learns how to use his mind properly. That money is better spent by sending it to the government, so they can help ensure everyone has an education through more and more of those fabulous public schools.”
You get the idea? Don’t laugh. This is precisely where the notion of “You are your brother’s keeper,” (Obama’s morality) applied consistently, leads. This is exactly the sort of reasoning upon which all of America’s Great Societies, New Deals, Fair Deals, and New Frontiers depend. Virtually all of our political and academic leaders (liberal and conservative) now sanction the notion of collective purpose, so it does not matter too much, any longer, who wins which election.
Of course, in America the notion of purely selfless purpose—even in today’s relentlessly anti-self-interest environment —would never sell to the masses if expressed openly in those terms. But let’s face it. Most Americans have become hypocrites. On the one side they imply: “I work for myself and my family first. That’s my motivation and I’m not ashamed of it.” But then most of them turn around and applaud the politician who says, in one form or another, that we must have a collective purpose to our lives.
Think of the religious person who’s forced to pay for secular public schools, and government-financed abortions, against his moral conscience. Think too of the liberal person, who’s forced to pay for the religiously faith-based programs of the religious minister who runs around condemning abortion, homosexuality, and the teaching of evolution. In each case, one individual is being forced, through the coercion of taxation, to pay for something he despises.
This is not the definition of a free country. It’s the definition of tyranny.
Think of the parent who works hard to send his child to a private school. Is he relieved from paying taxes to support the public school he won’t be using? No. Does he even obtain a tax credit? No. Because his central concern and “purpose,” he’s told, must be collective rather than individual. The same applies to the childless person and the homeschooling parents who do not need any schools at all.
You might reply: “But that’s just how it is, even in a free society. You have to accept that there are just minimal things a government must do, and we all must pay for them if we are to remain free.”
But if this is true, why stop with education? Why not force everyone to pay for everyone else’s health care? (Actually, Obamacare now assures that, as Medicare did before it.) I mean everything, from optical care to plastic surgery to tonsils removed. Why not force everyone to pay for everyone else’s computers? And cars? And groceries?
“Because,” most Americans would reply, “that would be socialism. This is not a socialistic country. People are responsible for themselves first.”
Oh, really? Then why are most people not responsible for purchasing their children’s own education? Why are farmers subsidized? Why are there corporate welfare subsidies and bailouts as never before? And why are political candidates financed by tax dollars, instead of having to raise the money solely themselves?
It seems like we will never call ourselves socialist, in principle; but in many real-life respects we are. We evade this fact by simply pretending that we’re not. That’s the American hypocrisy.
Here is the deeper question most of us evade but cannot escape: Is an individual’s life an end in itself—or a means to the ends of others’? In other words: should your top concerns be the addition on your house, your cruise vacation, and your child’s tutor? Or somebody else’s addition, somebody else’s child, or somebody else’s vacation?
To politicians who preach the ideas of “community responsibility,” “putting people first,” “great societies” and all the equivalent catch-phrases, it’s clear what they think. They just won’t admit it. But their actions tell us the truth, decade after decade.
The politicians and academics who insist that “society” must pay for housing, health care, prescription drugs, education, immunization, food for the third world, farm subsidies, and on and on are clearly implying that your life is a means to the ends of others. Otherwise, why would they demand that you pay for these goods and services, whether you want to or not?
Here’s what this ideology overlooks: Nothing in life is free. Anyone who offers to pay for something inevitably must control it. Indeed, it would be irresponsible for the payer not to do so. If the government is going to tell doctors, for example: “We’re picking up the tab. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and money is no object,” then what do you think will happen? The same thing that would happen to your own business if the government offered to subsidize it from now on. You’d stop worrying about cutting costs and, since the government is now paying for everything, you’d probably raise your prices through the roof.
How do you think health care got so expensive in the first place, primarily because of Medicare? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The government, of course, would have to call a halt before too long. If they didn’t, then soon everyone in the country would be paying a 100 percent tax rate to cover everyone else’s health care, subsidized mortgages, cars bought from subsidized auto companies, and all the rest.
Products declared “free” by the government tend to skyrocket demand for the self-same products. If the government is going to pick up the tab for something, then what have you got to lose by purchasing them on a whim? (“I don’t know if this skin cream really works. But my doctor says it won’t hurt me. And it’s already paid for, so what the heck?”) In fact, you’re not really purchasing the medicine. It’s being paid for by taxes—you know, those very taxes you’re always demanding be lower for yourself and higher for everyone else (especially the “evil” rich).
“OK,” you might reply. “So maybe those greedy companies will jack up their prices once the government picks up the tab. Then they deserve to have price controls on them.”
Maybe so—but remember that price inflation only went berserk because of government subsidies in the first place. And don’t think price controls serve your own interests, or the interest of justice. Because once the government sets artificial limits on prices (“artificial” in that they force prices to be lower than they otherwise would be, given supply and demand), then you inevitably experience: shortages.
Have you heard of (or do you possibly remember) the gas lines of the 1970s? If you’re too young to remember them, you’ve certainly heard about and seen pictures of them. Our government told us, at the time, that the gas lines were due to a fuel shortage. That was a lie. We know it was a lie, because when the government came to its senses in the early 1980s and lifted price controls on gasoline, the gas lines stopped and, by and large, never returned. There has been no shortage of fuel since then, and there never really was one. Granted, environmentalists won’t let us drill for oil beyond a certain point, and as a result prices of gas are higher than they would be. But don’t blame that on the free market. Environmentalists in Congress and the White House are to blame for high gas prices, more than anyone else.
Today’s intellectuals, politicians, and voters want Mother Teresa in charge of profit-making industries such as pharmaceuticals, medical care and fuel—but on a Rockefeller/Bill Gates budget, and with Star Trek results. That may sound well and good, if you subscribe to the philosophy of altruistic selflessness as so many do. But how is the new drug industry of Mother Teresa to acquire its Rockefeller budget if Rockefeller is not allowed to make a profit?
And ask yourself another question: Are you willing to apply selfless motivation to your own life too? If profit-making companies must forego profit and make lifesaving medicine simply for reasons of selfless charity, then why shouldn’t you have to do the same thing in your line of work? Fair is fair, after all.
Let’s say you are a banker. Or a writer. Or a teacher. Or have your own Internet business. It doesn’t matter what your chosen profession is. Are you willing to dispense with cost-of-living increases? Benefits? Family leave? Goodies of all sorts? I doubt it. Let’s say the government promises you a guaranteed minimal income, to make sure that you don’t starve or go without minimal health care (third world style). In other words, you can stay alive, but that’s all you can expect out of life. You can live like, say, the average Russian lives today. Is that what you really want? I’ll bet it isn’t. Americans still say, in overwhelming majorities, that they want their own lives to keep improving, and their childrens’ lives to be better than their own.
Yet if the philosophy of self-sacrifice is not going to apply to you, then by what right do you impose it on others? Even more: do you really want to impose the philosophy of self-sacrifice on others? To hold a gun to the head of the people upon whose ingenuity your very life may depend?
Self-interested, individual purpose is the only moral form of purpose; it’s also the only one that works. America was founded on the idea that each individual should choose and live by his own purpose. The only limits are that he may not initiate physical force against somebody else, or cheat others. If he does, we have police and courts. Otherwise, the individual is left totally alone and free to pursue his own definition of happiness.
For the most part, this was the dominant social, psychological and political attitude through the early part of the twentieth century. This mindset is now dismissed as archaic and wrong by nearly everyone. Yet relying on the original American approach, the United States went from an unsettled backward colony to the most magnificent civilization in human history…all in little over a century!
Why or how did this happen? It wasn’t just luck. It wasn’t merely being in the right place at the right time. It certainly wasn’t the government. The government stayed out, more than it interfered. There was no multi-trillion dollar welfare-regulatory-entitlement state prior to the twentieth century.
Historian David McCullough came close to naming the reason for this spectacular progress. He said of early American immigrants, “You come [to America]. You can do good work and you will be judged by the work you do. You can find pride and self-respect and identity through the work you do.”
Pride. Self-respect. Identity. These are self-interested virtues. These are not the virtues of people who get up in the morning and say, “How can I serve humanity?” Rather, these are the virtues of people who get up in the morning and say, “How can I live better today? How can I better provide for myself and my loved ones than I did yesterday?”
Hypocrisy and erroneous thinking keep most Americans from admitting it. But it’s the truth. They voted twice for Obama to reinforce the truth they don’t want to face. Sure, most are in favor of brother’s keeperism — so long as it’s their brother doing the keeping and they are the ones being kept. But if they really agreed with what Obama is saying, they would stop living for themselves and become Mother Teresa-like social servants tomorrow.
Distinctively American virtues are those of a people committed to constant self-improvement. In the process of improving themselves, of course, they created an unprecedented civilization from which the whole world could benefit. From the early Industrial Revolution, throughout the inventive era (now waning), to today’s Information Revolution, this has been the pattern. None of these innovations took place on the motive of sacrifice, selfless duty, or charity. It was rational self-interest and a ferocious desire for life (including profits) which fueled the American success stories—and it is still the case today.
This is one of the great lessons of the American experiment. Living by self-interest, and respecting individual rights, creates the sort of benevolent society the advocates of selflessness claim to want. Why is this? Because when people are left free to pursue their own interests and their own values, they feel empowered, happy, and in charge of their own existence. As a result, they tend to be more benevolent towards others.
But once they’re told that their own individual purposes are somehow wrong; and that they need to live for the community rather than for themselves, they become resentful. They become less motivated. And they should.
Think about your own motivation. If you are doing something because you feel you are forced to do so, either at gunpoint or because somebody is trying to emotionally manipulate you into feeling guilty, then what happens to your mental state? You become resentful. Angry. Unmotivated. You drag yourself through activities you otherwise feel no motivation to do.
Now, what if you are doing something through your own initiative? You feel energized. Hopeful. You recognize that even if you fail, at least it will be your own failure and not one you were forced into. You feel alive. And free.
This is a normal, natural and healthy way to feel. If it’s true of you as an individual, then it’s also true for a society. What is a society, after all, other than a collection of many different individuals?
Each individual’s life is an end in itself. You can’t control other people. You can only control your own destiny, through continuous effort and continuous use of your mind.
If you’re going to make the most of your talents and potential, you require three basic things:
One is to be left alone.
The second is the conviction that you should be living for yourself and your (chosen) loved ones, and that you need not feel guilty for it.
The third is your capacity to think, reason, and take responsibility for being productive in the realm of reality.
This is a tall order, indeed. But applied consistently, it can and will lead to a prosperous life—however you define prosperity, and so far as your abilities can carry you.
Freedom, rational self-interest, and a commitment to productivity: This is all the purpose you will ever need. And this is what makes any country or society work. Obama could not be more wrong.
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