I had written earlier about the dry, dry idea of Federal budgets being multiple years rather than the one-year mess they are now, and it got me thinking more about short-term vs. long-term vision. We all recall President Bush (41) mentioning "the vision thing" as a laugh line for a few weeks. But the "vision thing" is real, and if we allow ourselves to lose it, we are doomed as a country to be reactive rather than foresighted.
Here's what I mean. If I were President, or had some other bully pulpit that got my voice out to the USA, I would be trying to explain the limits of central planning to a nation, in the course of trying to present the essential "why" of anything I did or proposed.
Most everything we try to do as a Government is ultimately related to trying to encourage or discourage activity in the course of Government doing its constitutionally-mandated job. But we cannot encourage anything, or discourage others, absent a vision of what the best society we can provide is. The problem today is that our candidates speak as if there were indeed some Utopian society that is actually achievable, the governmental counterpart of "the perfect being the enemy of the very good." We wring our hands over things like income inequality, racial inequity, etc., as if there were a vision where all that goes away.
Here's my point: It never goes away. It never goes away, because people are human, there are a lot of us, and while we were all created equal, at least in the USA, we were not created equally. In other words, only a vision of America that accommodates the differences with which we were individually created makes sense. If you believe that everyone was born with the same talents, innate abilities and intelligence, or are imbued from upbringing with the same work ethic, you might as well stop reading here. Furthermore, if you believe that it is possible, let alone appropriate, to put everyone through some process that equalizes their intelligence, talent and drive, arrividerci. You won't like what follows.
The best possible USA is not where everyone is the same person. It is, from a governmental and societal perspective, where our individual limits are allowed to be approached as far as possible, where each person is able to, and motivated to, be the best version of themselves. There are brilliant people and there are the stupid; there are the talented and the tone-deaf; there are the hard workers and there are the lazy -- and a spectrum of values on each curve.
Given that, there is a "steady state" that any vision of the best USA should entail. We as a society can provide for the minimum education for all citizens and provide a society in which aspiration is heavily encouraged. In that society, what is valued is priced higher; the contributions of the most intelligent, hard-working, enterprising and talented can provide the most to society and those people will succeed. They will be admired and appreciated and will generally earn more than the less-gifted, less-talented and less industrious.
That said, this is not an elitist vision. The tradesman may choose to ply his or her trade and be happy with that life, or can seek to build a larger and larger enterprise to the extent his capabilities let him control it. The lawyer who is poor at her legal skills will not reach the height of her profession because her value to society is less than her who can argue points better. Because we are different, we will succeed at different rates.
In this vision of the USA, nothing we do, no laws we pass, can violate the principle of incentivizing success. We do take care of the invalid, the elderly, the incapacitated, those who cannot care for themselves because free societies do that, but we do not incentivize or subsidize sloth, laziness or unwillingness to work. The exceptions will be discussed ad nauseam, but they should not distract from the principle -- we should envision a steady state in the American economy and society that accommodates the fact that we're not all the same.
The next statesman with the guts to stand up and say that Utopia is not happening here will be the first.
I recall an editorial some years ago by a leftist in the Washington Post, citing the stratification of American earnings and referring to the bottom 20% and their chances of reaching the top 20%. He was trying to make some kind of "fairness" case and forgetting that by simple numbers, there will always be a bottom 20%. In the best achievable case in the USA, the top 20% will be there because they produce a quantifiable value appreciated by American society to the point of willingness to pay for it. In our steady state, that is the case.
As President, my early speeches would be to try to explain to America that people are different, and there will always be income inequality because there is value inequality. I would be trying to move the country toward a steady state where its economy and society are the best they can reasonably be given those differences. I may not say the words "Get over it", but that would be my point. You're given what God gave you and what your upbringing encourages, and if you have an issue with someone else earning more, well, worry about your own case. No one should be stopping you.
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
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