Renaissance In Responsibility

Mr. Tripp, retired from the building business, now devotes full time to travel, writing, and promotion of free enterprise.

There are several ways of Ting with financial problems learning to create more, learning to live on less, ganging up on the well-to-do.

Aside from the moral aspects, the last method is the least satis­factory way of all. In the first place, if all the money and prop­erty of the rich were taken and divided up equally among every­one, the difference it would make in anyone’s fortunes would be min­imal. It is our guess that the “di­vider upper” might find himself fifty dollars better off. At best this bounty would solve his financial problems for only a few days.

Very soon he would find himself in real trouble, as people with brains, industry, and daring be­took themselves off to some island retreat in the middle of the South Pacific.

Commerce would stagnate in a week. Chaos would ensue for want of intelligent decisions and sound direction of the worker’s energies. In sheer desperation the people would call upon a dictator to bring a semblance of order to the mess. Once again they would have bread — and slavery.

Learning to live on less is a much better way to attack the per­sonal financial problem, and many are doing it with considerable suc­cess. This involves simplification in many aspects of life, but de­mands no sacrifice of dignity or political freedom. Those who have been obliged to live on less not infrequently rediscover faculties for happiness within themselves, and within the great nature drama all around them.

Learning how to create more and have more is, of course, the best way of all. Wealth, honestly earned and wisely used, is the greatest of blessings. Not only does wealth enable a person to live on a higher economic, intellectual, and social plane, but it vastly in­creases a person’s usefulness to humanity at large. So everyone should consider it a duty to suc­ceed, in a material sense, to the best of his abilities.

But how can we go about the business of creating more wealth, or more bluntly, making more money? Is there a formula, rule, or system?

Obviously it is not possible for all to get rich, or even near rich. In the first place, a surprising number of people have no desire to do so. But many millions of people, discontented with their lot, could greatly improve their fiscal position if they purposely set about to do it.

If disgruntled wage earners could be persuaded to attack their problem on a personal basis, instead of wistfully looking to gov­ernment — including their own ef­forts at organized compulsion —to bail them out, many would find an answer, or a partial answer, to their dilemma.

Because Men Were Free

Success, financially, is not all a matter of brains, or even ability, though of course a good noodle is no drawback. More often than not success, and all it implies, is the reward of ordinary men will­ing to put forth extraordinary ef­fort. In this game, persistence is better than pulsating genius.

Our nation became great, pros­perous, and respected because, un­til a few years ago, the principle of personal responsibility and ac­countability had near universal acceptance. Our high production and high living standards were not achieved by government, but rather because there had been so little government. The progress of the past 25 years — there has been some — has been won in spite of government. But the tremendous advances during the first 150 years of our history were possible be­cause, for the first time in his long career, man found himself free. He was free to grow, develop, ex­pand, experiment, create, and keep the rewards of his creation.

It is true he often pooled his efforts with others, but this did not dull his concept of himself as a free and responsible agent, who must, in the long run, solve his own problems if he were to keep his hard-won freedoms.

This was a brand new idea in government, and it sprang from a brand new idea of man himself. It was an idealistic and Christian concept of humanity such as had not been known in recorded his­tory. But, above all, it was a prac­tical philosophy, too. It worked. It squared with man’s universal quest and hope for happiness, and belief in himself. But in the course of time it became an old idea, or so it seemed, so fast did events move in this new America. Sooner or later this idea, this new concept, had to collide with the worshipers of all things new.

Of course there is nothing new about slavery. There is nothing new about a system which makes the individual a total subject of the State, takes away his free­doms, prerogatives, responsibili­ties, along with his problems, and places his fate at the pleasure of others. But it was a new idea in America, anyway, and, ergo, it must be good.

This division of responsibility was fully upheld and extolled in the schools, with more and more emphasis on “team work,” “work­ing with the group,” and similar slogans, less and less stress on in­dividual effort and the expression of the individual personality. And all too soon that same individual came to see his problems less and less as personal challenges, but as something others ought to resolve for him. By “others” he meant the “guv’mint.” Who else?

“Give Us Security”

Now a peculiar thing happened. Just as soon as Mr. and Mrs. American Citizen placed their se­curity, and their financial prob­lems, in the hands of others, mean­ing the State, they began to feel insecure. And the more insecure they felt, the louder they yelled to government to make them secure. I am reminded of an Indian whose wagon tongue was much too short for his team. “I cut him off and cut him off. Still he too short,” complained the Redman.

Perhaps, in an abstract sort of way, both the Indian and the folks under discussion are right. Maybe it ought to be possible to make a thing longer by cutting it off. Maybe government ought to work these things out for us, give us security, good health, happiness, achievement, even a pleasing per­sonality. Perhaps if we could find a couple of million people with the brains of a genius and the morals of a saint, and give them all power, they could do it. But where are we to find so many nice, profound folks?

I don’t think we’re likely to find them under a system that wor­ships mediocrity and glorifies “the common man.”

As government grows bigger and assumes more and more of the citizen’s prerogatives, it must seek more and more personnel from an ever dwindling supply of eligible material. More and more people with no basic fitness or training in the exacting business of gov­ernment must be taken on the pay­rolls. So we may as well get recon­ciled to the fact that big govern­ment will always be, and by its very nature must be, inefficient, corrupt, arbitrary, irresponsible, and often just plain stupid.

Looking to this kind of a gov­ernment for security in our old age, for the solution to all sorts of personal, social, and economic problems is a most grave mistake, I believe. I realize some problems are difficult, perhaps a few insolu­ble by the individual, working alone by himself. In such cases he should have help, and no odium should attach to that help. But the help should be of a kind cal­culated to restore him to useful­ness and self-respect. This is not only the best kind of help; it is the only real and permanent help. Certainly most problems can best be solved by the individual him­self, if he were permitted and once more encouraged to do so.

He cannot solve his financial problem so long as government taxes away from 20 to 91 per cent of his earnings. But even with in­come taxes at near confiscatory levels it is still possible, for those who need to do so most, to greatly improve their fiscal status by deal­ing with the problem on a personal basis.

Probably the most insidious thing about looking to others for the solution to problems and diffi­culties is that we could, in time, lose all power to do for ourselves, like the gulls of St. Augustine when the shrimp boats moved away. Nature abhors a useless ap­pendage or an unused faculty. As we look more and more to govern­ment, to “society,” for answers to problems which affect us person­ally, we become ever less able to cope with them, and require more and more outside help. This could lead to a “chain reaction” of fatal scope, more and more needing help, fewer and fewer to do the helping.

Education Needed

However, powerful forces are at last at work to rekindle the con­cept of individual responsibility, reward, and personal freedom, which blazed brightly on this con­tinent as man proclaimed the strange doctrine that “that gov­ernment governs best which gov­erns least.” And that government was made to serve man, rather than the other way ’round.

The most difficult part will be to “sell” freedom to millions of young people who have never known freedom, and to prove to them that the only real, perma­nent, lasting security is that which the individual can create for him­self, acting as a free and account­able human being.

People never miss what they have never known. Millions of young people have never known what it means to be able to start and operate a business without a corps of lawyers at their elbows, and to keep what the business made. Millions of young farmers have never known what it means to be free to plant crops of their choosing, as much as they choose, to sell to the highest bidder. Few young people have ever held a gold piece in their hands, or known any incorruptible money. These, I submit, are formidable obstacles. But they are not insurmountable. What the people once lightly gave away, they can take back. But first there must be desire.

Personal Development

Serious inroads have already been made on our precious liber­ties and freedoms, yielded by us a bit at a time on a thousand fronts. But we have time —enough, if we will use it — to an­chor those freedoms we still have and to regain some of those lost. Here, indeed, is one field where “group action” is loudly indicated. Here the most individualistic indi­vidual should find a common rally­ing ground, not to merge and sub­merge himself in the mass, but to guarantee his survival as a per­sonality.

So we see that the fate and prob­lems of the individual are badly mixed with the modern misnamed “liberalism” which rules today.

But not hopelessly mixed. There are still avenues for escape, through a man’s own efforts. His problem as an individual is part of an even bigger problem which he has, in most cases, blithely created for himself. He can best begin to set his own affairs in order when he is better informed of the problem in its total aspects.

I believe a renaissance of per­sonal, individual responsibility and moral accountability is the thing most needed today. Some­day we shall have to stop blaming “society” for our failures, stop blaming the other fellow when our personal affairs go haywire. Gov­ernment can only solve one per­son’s problem by adding to the problem of another. It cannot get at the root of your difficulty, or my trouble, never has, never will.

Vexing as our personal financial state may be, the only practical ap­proach is still a personal one, using our resources and intelli­gence as best we can. While we may not have to do the job all alone, we had best assume we shall have to do so. Many people have achieved great things simply by depending on themselves and hav­ing faith in themselves. But no one has ever gotten very far by pur­suing an opposite course.