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"Economic Reform" Bringing New Heat To Election Summer

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: Now that the political parties' primaries have largely ended, and with less than three months before the crucial mid-term elections in the United States, the campaigning for America's heart and soul is underway in earnest. U.S. voters will be asked nothing less than what kind of nation they want to be, and there is a crisp divide between the two competing ideologies on offer. One side offers a governing philosophy of high taxes and high (some would say outrageous) spending centered around so-called "entitlements." The other side wants you to agree with Henry David Thoreau, who said "That government is best which governs least," and seeks smaller government, low taxes, and reliance on private-sector entrepreneurialism to drive economic growth and prosperity.

"Economic Reform" Bringing New Heat To Election Summer

Get Ready To Hear Incumbents Say The Darndest Things Now that the political parties' primaries have largely ended, and with less than three months before the crucial mid-term elections in the United States, the campaigning for America's heart and soul is underway in earnest. U.S. voters will be asked nothing less than what kind of nation they want to be, and there is a crisp divide between the two competing ideologies on offer. One side offers a governing philosophy of high taxes and high (some would say outrageous) spending centered around so-called "entitlements." The other side wants you to agree with Henry David Thoreau, who said "That government is best which governs least," and seeks smaller government, low taxes, and reliance on private-sector entrepreneurialism to drive economic growth and prosperity.

The tax-and-spend folks are mostly incumbents, would primarily call themselves "progressives," and prefer to hang out in the Democratic party. The small-government folks, some encouraged by the phenomenon of "tea party" groups, tend toward the GOP these days. And, of course, there are "progressive" Republicans, and some would argue there are still some more-conservative Democrats (though I defy you to name one these days).

Meanwhile in America, there is a wide and growing chasm between two fundamentally-opposed attitudes that tend to dominate people and their behavior. I believe each of us has an inner Entrepreneur warring with an inner Victim for control, and that each of us will be dominated either by our entrepreneur's attitude of self-reliance and personal responsibility, or by our victim's attitude of abdication and entitlement (there's that word again). Politicians instinctively know this, and they will be talking to your inner combatants this election season. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs will end up voting for the folks they think will bring them smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a chance to reach for the American dream through enterprise. They will bet on themselves. And victims will vote for the folks they think will give them more stuff, to which, after all, they feel entitled. They will place their bets on politicians to bail them out.

Our founding fathers fretted that this would happen - that as soon as people figured out they could vote themselves a grab of the national treasury, the republic was in trouble. And when times are tough, the victim attitude is a darn-sight easier for politicians to play to. Why do we have the tax-and-spend, Democrat-dominated federal government we have today? There are many contributing factors, including the fact that the other side fumbled the ball when they had a chance to do some broken-field running... but I'd assert that the main reason is that, starting with the 2006 congressional election, Americans simply lost their nerve and fell en masse into victimhood.

By the way, it isn't as extreme as all that - most of the elections that put liberal/progressive politicians in power, including Barack Obama, have been very close. The entrepreneurial spirit is still out there, and now that we've seen what the liberals have offered now that they finally have total control over our national government, it looks to me like conservative entrepreneurialism is roaring back.

In the meantime, get ready for a big sales pitch aimed at your inner victim. The chief campaign tactics apparently favored by the incumbent liberals include continuing to blame all our woes on George W. Bush (who's been retired for nearly two years) and to play class- and race-warfare cards at every opportunity. They have to paint the "tea party" folks as scary, violent thugs who want a return to "tax cuts for the rich." And they need you to believe the end is nigh if you return the "evil Republicans" to power.

I don't think this is going to work. When the liberals ask us "are you gonna believe what you see, or what I tell you about what you see," I think we're going to go with the former this time around. Everything the liberal government has offered has been disastrous: the "stimulus" didn't stimulate anything but government corruption, all the "jobs programs" we were told would keep unemployment below eight percent have instead kept it closer to ten, the health care "reform" didn't fix health care for anyone but did serve as a vehicle to seize all student lending, the administration's disastrous approach to immigration has actually ceded huge territories of America to criminal drug cartels, our new foreign policy of apology has left us and our allies vulnerable in historic ways, and the botched handling of the BP oil spill (worse than Bush did with Hurricane Katrina) was manipulated merely to give the administration a chance to halt offshore drilling and deal a crippling blow to our economy.

As poll after poll shows low and falling support for the government's policies (roughly two-thirds of Americans disagree with just about any major policy you can name), some of the liberal incumbents will start to abandon the play-to-your-victim tactics and instead resort to some trusty tools used by politicians throughout history: flip-flops and lies. You already see incumbents starting to whisper about extending the "Bush tax cuts" of 2001 and 2003, as the argument against de facto tax hikes in a troubled economy gains traction. By November, I predict these whisperings will, at least on the part of some incumbents, start to sound like "promises."

Don't be fooled. Though it would be the only thing they would get right, the liberal government is NOT going to extend those tax cuts. From the president down, they campaigned heavily against those cuts, and ending them is perhaps the most central tenet of their governing philosophy. It's what they call "economic reform" (and it is that, if by "reform" you mean "form a new socialism to replace free-market capitalism"). As things heat up this election season, you may hear liberals pretending to lean toward conservative principles, but if you return them to power, you'll be sorely disappointed. Especially if you're an entrepreneur trying to run one of the little businesses that drives American prosperity.

Don't be a victim.

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Article Tags: economic reform, finance reform, government takeover, personal responsibility



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