A great, great essay by Rick Moran.
He starts with a call to humility that I wish many more people, left and right, would subscribe to.
I am not a well read man – or, at least, not as well read as I
should be. Nor do I claim any extraordinary intellectual gifts. I
regularly fail the test of possesing a “well ordered mind” in that my
insights at times lack depth and even coherence. I admit to
emotionalism when logic and reason are called for. And I lack the
discipline to rigorously examine concepts that do not generally conform
to my own, narrow view of the world.
I guess that makes me
human. And a blogger. “Humility is truth,” said my favorite philosopher
Erasmus. Would that all of us take those words to heart and perhaps
even etch them onto our monitors. “A man’s got to know his
limitations,” said my favorite movie character Harry Callahan. That
adage should be branded on our hearts to remind us that an examined
life is a fulfilling life.
Who else (but a great blogger) would think to link Erasmus and Dirty Harry?! But it goes on from there. To state the theme:
[T]o my mind, the question of whether we in the United States will be
living an “easier life” in a European style welfare state w[h]ere the poor
and middle class are dependent on government for many things they could
or should be doing for themselves or enjoying an “earned life” in a
state that promotes individual responsibil[i]ty and self sufficiency will
be answered in the next 4 to 8 years. [...]
There are 400 years of struggle behind us to create a society where
the individual took responsibility for his own well being and that of
his family, his fortunes rising or falling based on his native
abilities and talents. The reward was “an earned life” of personal
satisfaction and a feeling of self worth and accomplishment that you
simply cannot experience if you depend on government for as much as we
do today. Or as much as we will in the near future if more of our
freedoms are given up in the name of personal security and comfort.
I have to fight the temptation to quote too much, because I want you to go over there and read the whole thing. But note that Rick gives the counterarguments respect: he does not claim that suffering is ennobling -- but that independence is. And he understands that we're not living on the frontier, but in a confounding wilderness of institutions and industries in which we long since gave up the all-round competence that is the physical foundation of independence:
What
do we care how our ancestors lived? This is, after all, the 21st
century and the need for a large government is self-evident. A nation
of 300 million people have legitimate needs that no one except
government can fill. We can’t walk out our door and shoot a deer to
feed our families. Nor can we build a cabin to house them. And few of
us have the skill necessary to make our own clothing. There’s no
alternative to modern medicine if we get sick – a hugely expensive
proposition as we all know. Beyond that, we must be protected from
those who would abuse the freedoms they’ve been given to deliberately
pollute the land and water, make dangerous products, place workers in
unnecessarily hazardous conditions, and take untoward advantage in the
marketplace.
On the one hand, we are presented with the
abstract – the ideal as it were – of self sufficiency and independence
while on the other the real world problems of living in an
industrialized democracy.
To resolve this conundrum in the best way possible under the circumstances, Rick thinks, it's not even necessary (or maybe possible) to limit the size of government -- "a juggernaut with a life of its own, gathering momentum over the last
half century like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering speed and
size, until it is impossible to control only get out of its way." But we can get out of its way. We can choose to carry our own weight, and to support and seek support from those we care about (in today's world, not always kin or intimates, but also those whom the inspired crazy currents of global churn have carried to the doorsteps of our attention), to the modest extent possible, and derive from that some of the satisfaction Rick commends.
(I don't know if this counts: I have considered opting into Social Security early -- because the extra hundreds of dollars a month would make a real difference -- but I just don't want to. It's not that I think it means I'll get less later; I've been told that this isn't even significantly true, at least until an age so advanced that you have fair odds of never getting there. It just goes against the grain. I might be entitled to it, but I don't like the idea of being part of that entitled baby-boomer burden that the smaller next generation is already starting to groan under. The result of not kicking the government vending machine to get my coins back is that I periodically become a burden on my family -- which at least, in Rick's terms, means we're taking care of our own. (Independence is really interdependence.) When I was going down in a debt spiral, thanks to many years of stupidity, cowardice, escapism, and some circumstances that were actually beyond my control, my father steered me into a debt-management program with much reduced, but still significant, interest rates, when many people would have declared bankruptcy -- another thing I'm really glad I didn't do, that follows you for the rest of your life like a felony rap sheet. When I get through with the DMP in a little over a year, I'll still have to catch up on my taxes. It's all OK. I'll die debt free, and it will be a lifetime's lesson well learned. Rick is right about this: it's not about the rewards of doing the right thing, because there aren't necessarily any. It's its own reward.)
But that's a digression and a distraction from Rick's essay, which is so good that it attracts a high caliber of independent thinking in the many comments as well.
