We Have Yet to Learn
We Have Yet to Learn
By Gregg MacDonald
Mr. MacDonald, a trustee of The Foundation for Economic Education, resides in Issaquah, Washington.
The ideas of man, expressed in one way or another, have come down to us over and over again for the past 50 centuries. As we approach the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to come up with an original thought. What a great thing Adam had, quipped Mark Twain. When he said something good, he knew nobody else had said it before. One would think we would have learned something after 5,000 years, but it just hasn’t happened. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Hegel observed, What experience and history teach us is that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Hegel was right. People and governments never learn from history, and go on repeating the same mistakes.
If we had learned anything at all from the past, we would know that every economy must sooner or later rely upon some sort of profit-and-loss system to spur groups or individuals to productivity. Slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm have always turned out to be too unproductive, or too expensive—not to mention too immoral.
Prosperity depends on the incentive of profit, but more than that, it depends on freedom. Those who failed to learn this from the past should certainly learn it from the present by looking at the collapse of communism in Russia, the failure of communism 90 miles off our coast in Cuba, or the tragic legacy of communism in China.
What We Can Learn from Rome
When we think of the Roman Empire (and it seems that everybody today tries to draw an analogy between the decline of America and the fall of the Roman Empire), we think of Roman citizens as being free, even though there were a great many slaves in the Empire. Roman politicians lusted after citizens’ votes and support just as politicians do today. Commerce and business thrived in this free economy. Farmers, shoemakers, estate agents, bakers, manufacturers, builders, innkeepers, and a host of other tradesmen and professionals flourished. In the early centuries of the Empire, just as in the early days of the United States, the farmers were the backbone of the nation, providing stability and food as well as strong, free men to defend Rome and fight its battles.
Under the Emperor Diocletian, however, Rome succumbed to outright socialism. Government spending led to inflation and increasing poverty. In A.D. 301, Diocletian issued an Edictum de pretiis, which set maximum prices and wages for all important goods and services. (In today’s world such measures are simply called wage and price controls.) The results were disastrous and set the stage for the fall of the Empire and the beginning of serfdom in the Middle Ages.
Diocletian put extensive public works into operation to boost employment, and food was given to the poor at little or no cost. The government brought nearly all major industries and guilds—unions—under explicit control. Paul-Louis, in his Ancient Rome at Work, tells us that in every large city, the state became a powerful employer . . . standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation. Will Durant noted that businessmen predicted ruin, but Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate, and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty could be made secure.
Diocletian’s expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy proved to be too much to handle. To support all this government—the army, courts, public works, and welfare—taxes rose so high that men lost the incentive to work or earn. Lawyers kept finding ways to evade taxes, but other lawyers formulated laws to prevent evasion. To escape the tax men, thousands of Romans fled over the frontiers to find refuge with the barbarians Diocletian said were at the walls of Rome. (It makes one wonder why the barbarians wanted to get in.)
In an effort to stem the tide of fleeing citizens, and to facilitate regulations and taxation, the government issued decrees binding the farmers to their fields and the workers to their shops until all their debts and taxes had been paid in full. And, as mentioned, serfdom entered its initial stage.
The Modern Welfare State
Technologically, the modern world, and the Western world especially, are no more like ancient Rome than the moon is like the sun. But, technology and science aside, the civilization of Rome in the time of Diocletian vividly reminds us how much our own government parallels the Roman government that existed then. The welfare state, the huge bureaucracy to run it, stifling government regulations, and exorbitant taxes to pay for it all—is there that much difference between our present-day American government and the regime that prevailed in Diocletian’s Rome? And, again, technology and science aside, ideas and thoughts seem to have changed little.
There can be no lasting, healthy economy without freedom. When we are told by government bureaucrats just what we are allowed to do on our property, told whom we must employ, and where we must send our children for an education—can we honestly say we are free?
The average American worker pays government forty-seven percent out of each dollar he or she earns. This money is taken by the IRS, FICA, local and state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and on and on. Many people don’t realize this. How can you say you are free if half of everything you earn is taken away from you by government?
A healthy economy, in order to grow and spread and benefit the most people without taking away from others, needs freedom to expand. What we have in the United States today is an economy that has evolved through government control to satisfy self-indulgence and greed. Nor is it an economy embedded in freedom. Somerset Maugham warned us that If any nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
The people of the United States at the end of the twentieth century have certainly placed a high value on comfort and money. Entitlements, golden parachutes, and rich government pensions are just a few of the programs and schemes that are relentlessly driving our economy onto dangerously thin ice. If enormous bureaucracies on the local, state, and federal levels are the price we are willing to pay for government contracts, welfare, and entitlements in order to retain comfort, then can a sick economy be far behind? And is the loss of freedom even closer? []
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3525
Teaching America
Teaching America
Do you know our heroes?
By William J. Bennett
These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation’s young people; too many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know this.
The truth is, we’ve been in far worse shape in terms of what we’ve had to endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of their own country’s history.
This year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (our “Nation’s Report Card”) revealed that over 50-percent of our nation’s high-school students — our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their education careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades with the Nation’s Report Card, you will see students know more in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know about it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest political story ever told so dim?
Too many of our nation’s adults have taken too dark a view of their country and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation. Too many in our culture would rather point out our nation’s failings than its successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views). Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.
Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks like the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs and tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the tragedy of those failures intact — they don’t redact, they don’t gloss over, and they don’t dull down.
But that is not the history we give to our students. One education expert recently wrote, “students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a complete history book.” That’s a history book of any sort: a biography, a 1776, a Bruce Catton Civil War book. And, a recent national survey found that a majority of public high-school students are never assigned as much as 12-page history paper.
This is doubly tragic when we stop to consider we are not talking about just any country’s history here, we are talking about our country’s history — the country Abraham Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.” We are, after all, a country that has prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for those who could not defend themselves, we have liberated the immiserated, and we are a city of refuge for foreigners as well.
With all that has gone wrong in our war and in our economy dare I repeat our merits and take a positive view? Of course I do. In the midst of a previous war’s dark days that had cost many lives and would cost many more — hundreds of thousands more — President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still say “we are a great nation” even as we fought for what he called “total victory” against an enemy that hewed to a “pirate philosophy” of fascism, even as we had just come out of the Great Depression. And, I remind that Lincoln could call us the “last best hope” only three months after Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history.
But, America is not just the story of presidents. It is not just the study of great leaders, but, rather, of the undertaking of a great people — the study of great citizens who wisely choose how to save themselves and others, how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest nation in the history of the world.
While we have our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Roosevelts, our Trumans, our Reagans, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life, in every city in America. If we take on the complete study of our country again — the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly — we will realize that for every anti-hero that we can be criticized for, there are hundreds of heroes; for every dark moment, there are thousands of rays of light to be seen through the passing clouds
Those who watched the recent Medal of Honor service for Lieutenant Michael Murphy were awestruck by the presentation to this young man’s family — by hearing of how Lt. Murphy’s “powerful sense of right and wrong,” guided him his whole life, and how he embraced from an early age the importance of “defend[ing] those who could not defend themselves.” “Murph,” as he was known by his friends, was our nation’s 3,445th Medal of Honor recipient, the highest honor our nation bestows.
Why don’t our schools take next week, as Veteran’s Day is celebrated, to start a program where they learn about “Murph” and the other Medal of Honor winners throughout their elementary- and secondary-school careers? Why not invite a veteran in to school next week? Such study would help teach our children history with real-life heroes and, at the same time, it would help repay the debt to those heroes by transmitting their stories unto the next generations. I cannot think of a greater way for young children and young adults to learn history than through the stories that make our history — and these stories deserve to be told and retold.
A time of war is a terrible thing, but it brings opportunities for teachable moments, and it is about the best time there can be to make our heroes and their cause teachable and estimable again. If we rededicate ourselves to studying our history and our people rightly, if we take the time to look at the entirety of our firmament, we will see what our Founders saw we could be, what foreigners who came here saw all along, and what we ourselves can — even today — see once again: that we have something precious here. That something is called America, where young men and women sign up to protect her each and every day in the uniform of our armed services. And it is worth the time of every young man and every young woman in our nation’s classrooms to study why.
—William J. Bennett is the author of Volumes I & II of America: The Last Best Hope — a new box set of American history (including a special audio tribute to Ronald Reagan). Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute .
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGU0MTA5NDIyZDI0M2ViNDdkYWQ4NDIzYzE5OWQzMzQ=
