You are invited to read the latest commentary from the Free Enterprise Foundation. It will make you think!

Onward and Upward

That government, which governs least, governs best. (Thomas Jefferson)

As we contemplate the largest expansion of government since the 1930s, I find it ironic that it is the founder of the Democratic Party who is known for the saying that is the touchstone for this article, my one hundredth for The Mercury. Small government is certainly not one of the experiences to be rung in with the Obama Administration. Super- sized government is almost certainly more like it! Big government and with it the ethical chaos in New York and Illinois, can be expected to create an endless supply of targets for my pen in 2009, but what I would like to write to you about this morning, the last day of 2008, is what I have learned by the ritual of looking inside myself and then out at the national scene 100 times.

My first lesson is that while technology has transformed our world, it has not transformed our character. Man is pretty much the same fractured soul he has been down through time. I am an optimist so I tell myself that I see signs of progress, but technology has so equipped us with destructive power, is it any wonder that the doomsday clock creeps ever closer to its Midnight cataclysm? The mastery of emotion and intellect in a balanced ego has yet to be accomplished by sufficient numbers of us, that man’s destructive qualities and his cruelty to his fellow man can be quickly smothered by the rest of us.

With cherubic trust many in our country look to Saint Barack to restore “middle class” values as well as the middle class to its ascendant role by the end of his first term. They are bound to be disappointed. The malaise is in us. The failures in our society are our failures. The solutions also must be our solutions, not something hatched in Washington. So long as we do nothing to restore the essential character of our people, any and all new government services will fall on soiled ground, soon finding ways to twist and corrupt outcomes further enslaving taxpayers in government’s own version of a Ponzi scheme.

I have written often of our founders’ beliefs and the central role of morality and religiosity as their prescription for our perpetuation as a people. John Adams was typical in expressing these views when he noted that our Constitution “was meant for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” It wasn’t that our founders wished to prescribe any particular sectarian philosophy, but they recognized the need of civil society to have an abiding set of behavioral norms at its core.

As Americans we are the “mutts” of the world. We come from every condition and everywhere, but heretofore we have all aspired to be Americans. I question whether that is still true. Many in our inner cities preserve dependence not only on their home country’s language but consecrate their lives to retaining customs of their foreign land in America rather than blending into to the mosaic of American life. Their communities in our land have become a center for violence and gang activity which has fractured whole communities in coping with the destructive forces on our way of life.

An essential part of our character has been a belief, if not a rigid adherence to the Ten Commandments. Our prior generation’s heroes were our heroes, not asterisked and disregarded for some alleged violation of this generation’s morals, not their own. Rather than aggressively combat this educational vacuum, society courts disaster by permitting an anything goes code of civic responsibility. While popular culture extols shamefully sybaritic lifestyles. We are now losing our history and replacing it with a void that mongrelizes our mother tongue. Today’s culture suffers from a preoccupation with intrusive examination into the lives of pop icons and elevates the emotion of the moment as the directional force in our culture.

What has become of good old self control? If we are to restore our country to its previously earned reputation for courage, inventiveness, productivity, humanity and world leadership, we need to embrace the heroic aspects of our past. The saga of our ancestors in the world that was is well worth embracing by the world that is. We need to assure that each new American understands and wishes to add their noble efforts to those who came before.

I can and will write about the individual national policy alternatives we face in the days ahead, but I cannot proffer a happy ending unless, as a people, we assure that our generations growing to majority now and in the future are well grounded in Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and a host of others, (not simply those “dead white guys”) who have given their lives to pass on to us this land that is our home. Certainly our education needs to do a better job in the sciences, but if we don’t do a better job providing an understanding of our history and our values, there is likely not to be a future worth inheriting.

It may be what I complain about is the product only of a hungry media that records and sells all that shocks the senses. I continue to be impressed with the great heart of the mass of Americans who respond in record numbers for every imaginable good cause. Clearly we still have an acute national conscience, but if so how can we fail to make a national priority of instilling a sense of historical reference and responsibility in each of our offspring and those who come to our land seeking the freedom and opportunity which is the uniquely American product of that history we are failing to cherish?

Copyright © 2009 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

If you’d like to contribute an article to this collection please e-mail it for review .