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June 18, 2009
Exclusive: Should ‘Help Thy Neighbor’ Mean Indiscriminately Bail Him Out?
If I’m going to help my neighbor, I want it to be my idea. If he’s gotten sick or injured and needs assistance to recover I’d be glad to help out – and I would feel good doing so. I’d know I could count on him to help me if I need it. Friendships develop this way and community is strengthened.
Maybe another of my neighbors has been doing stupid things and I don’t want to help him. Perhaps I think it’s best that he suffer the consequences of his actions. If my government forces me to help out my boneheaded neighbor when I would not otherwise choose to, I’d resent that as most would. That resentment would be contagious and would weaken communities – may even ultimately destroy them.
Our country was founded on the idea that we’re endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights including: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We need government to safeguard our right to life by hiring sheriffs, creating courts and prisons for those who might take our lives – and to raise a military that would protect against foreign invaders.
We also need a constitution that protects us from that government because it’s the biggest threat to our liberty. The founding fathers recognized this and structured our Constitution to limit government power. We don’t have the right to happiness – only the right to pursue it. Whether we catch any or not is strictly up to us.
That’s how we started out in these United States. However, Americans in the mid- to late 20th century started believing they had a right to free food, housing, health care, a college education, a pension, and they didn’t even believe they should have to pursue it. It should be given to them whether they work for it or not and – there are enough of them to influence elections at all levels – federal, state and local. Now both the White House and Congress are under the firm control of the “redistributionists.”
How did we get here? How did we go from the land of opportunity to the land of entitlement? The government we made to safeguard our God-given rights has grown so big it’s bestowing “rights” not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution. It’s granting those “rights” to some groups of Americans and forcing others to pay for them. Americans who pay their own mortgages now have to help pay for those who don’t.
Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, suggests we got here through what he calls the “grand liberal project” begun during the Progressive Era, continuing during the New Deal, the Great Society, and culminating in the Obama Administration, whatever it may come to be called. Hopenchange? Maybe.
President Wilson believed ours is a “living Constitution” which could be changed when “progressives” deemed it necessary without the cumbersome and time-consuming amendment process outlined in Article V. President Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court with judges who would rubber-stamp his stretching of the Constitution to provide his new “Economic Bill of Rights.”
With President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, government grew even bigger. President Obama is growing it so big it’ll soon outweigh the private sector. With national health care a possibility this summer, government spending will be at about 49 percent of our Gross Domestic Product – well within the realm of socialism by anyone’s measure. As columnist Mark Steyn wrote on Monday, “Once big government’s in place, it’s very hard to go back.”
We all know a neighbor or a brother-in-law who’s been using his equity as an ATM machine and is now in danger of foreclosure. None of us are going to be happy about picking up part of his mortgage payment under Obama’s mortgage bailout program. As Patrick.net puts it, it’s a “plan to reward debtors at the expense of savers.” President Obama can make as many speeches as he wants about “unscrupulous” lenders who “forced” our irresponsible relatives and neighbors to borrow money, but we know better. A fool and his money are soon parted.
Democrats are struggling to prop up housing prices that have to drop. They’re patching the housing bubble with trillions of our grandchildren’s dollars. Before long that bubble and the Democrat bubble will burst simultaneously and the rest of us will have to pick up the pieces – if we can.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Tom McLaughlin Tom is a history teacher and a regular weekly columnist for newspapers in Maine and New Hampshire. He writes about political and social issues, history, family, education and Radical Islam. E-mail him at tommclaughlin@fairpoint.net.
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