Mrs. Scoltock is a housewife in Des Moines, Iowa.
I do not have a Ph.D. and I usually skip over the statistics in an article, but I am in favor of liberty for the individual as opposed to the government-managed State and I think my reasons are as good as anyone else’s.
In the first place, the government-managed State here in America takes on a particularly irritating form. In Russia they come right out and kill people in wholesale lots, force pitiful, shawl-wearing grandmothers to sweep the streets in summer dresses at twenty below zero, and deport political prisoners to Siberia to die the slow death of slave labor. Anyone can see that the government-managed State as it exists in Russia is wrong. The Chinese communist State has the same “virtue” as the Russian. Even intellectuals who at first considered Mao an agrarian reformer now have to admit that some rather regrettable things are going on in China. However, here in America the government-managed State’s public image is that of a huge settlement house managed by junior Robert Owens for the benefit of laboring men, farmers, the elderly, and whoever else is part of a voting bloc.
It is somehow more infuriating to be considered part of a faceless mass of voters to be kept happy by a social security health program, or whichever of their bag of “benefits” applies to us, than it would be to have the visible whip of government power cracked over our heads. I do not want these junior Robert Owens now in power to read about the strange creatures in my social class and immediately start building a new and costly pen for us and supplying us with government hay, so that we won’t have to forage for ourselves in the woods.
What makes the proliferation of our government-managed State so insidious is that those at the top actually see themselves as virtuous saviors who are fighting to bring all the elements of our economy under strict control so as to benefit us all. The worldly-wise and rather cynical idea of our Founding Fathers that governments must have built-in restraints because they tend to behave like the camel with his nose under the tent has been completely repudiated by these “liberal” intellectuals.
New Leaders Needed
Encouraged by the present all-encompassing scope of our federal government, leaders who believe in the government-managed State are popping their fuzzy heads up all over the country like dandelions in our front yard in the spring. What we need are leaders who believe in liberty for the individual and who are able to disassemble this sprawling governmental monster and prevent its tentacles from choking the life blood out of the ordinary taxpayer. However, the government-management boys seem to be more articulate and quite able to assume the benign mask of noble compassion for the less privileged classes—no matter how oddly the mask looms above their well-tailored shoulders.
If they were actually to achieve the end product of their design, they would be sorry. Ever-increasing government management would eventually lead to anemia and final death of our free enterprise system; and then these well-intentioned social workers would have to get out the whip and brass knuckles the way they do in Russia and try to make our vast economy work by government coercion. So far, however, free enterprise has been so indestructible that it has survived mismanagement by its politically inclined beneficiaries, and continues to supply them with private planes, Florida vacations, and the other “necessities” of life.
So the question remains—how can we effectively fight against becoming gray-faced members of a government settlement house run by young and attractive social workers who view us with patronizing distaste? To me, the only solution is to take our forefathers’ ideas on liberty for the individual and set them forth unequivocally to sink or swim in the modern environment. We need many more people who will catch the flaming torch of liberty and reject the sticky spider web of the Welfare State. People need to know what it is in terms of liberty or fetters (programs calling for higher taxes and more government control) that they are voting for at the polls. It is possible to show them; and it will be to our everlasting discredit if they are not shown.
The Albatross
We who believe in liberty for the individual are weighed down by quite an overstuffed albatross—the people who are conservative simply because they have carved out a luxurious niche for themselves in our society and want to maintain the status quo. Our opponents who want to whip us all into line in their government-managed State have us over a very uncomfortable barrel when they say that we are fat, self-satisfied people who want things to stay as they are so that our economic positions will not be damaged—because some of us are!
These believers in individual liberty for purely selfish reasons vote against excessive government control, but their presence on our side alienates many more people than their votes are worth. We need to find some way to penetrate the well-massaged hides of these materialists and help them understand that something besides three-inch steaks and membership in an exclusive club is at stake.
Freedom for the individual is still the most revolutionary thought at large in the world today and should irresistibly attract the keenest minds among our emerging young intellectuals. If it does not, we of the middle generation have failed to articulate it.
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A Leaky Bucket
Federal aid to education is comparable to carrying water in a leaky bucket from your own reservoir to a big central well. What is left of the water is poured into the well, and then those in charge apportion you some water in that same leaky bucket and you bring it home.
Besides losing what water is spilled on the two-way trip, you eventually find yourself being told what to do with the water that remains—although it was your own water in the beginning.
Education means learning. And the principal lesson one learns about federal aid to education is that you end up with considerably less than you started out with. Wouldn’t it be wiser to keep the water at home in the first place?
Life Line.
Foot Notes
1 See P. T. Bauer’s U.S. Aid and Indian Development, 1959, published by the American Enterprise Association.
