When I was a youngster, my mother introduced me to “This Too Will Pass,” the mantra for hard times, and it has served me and millions of others well down through tough times. Though today’s challenge is great and the pain intense on the trail we walk, the pain and weariness will pass. They are but temporary. There will be a better day tomorrow. What is important is that we do not lose our way. The experience will change us, for it is a road most of us have not traveled previously, and great challenge always effects its change upon us. To keep us on the right path, I recommend both Rev Boetcker‘s and Dr. Rogers’ comforting words as guidance to live by.

Reverend William Boetcker offers above some sage but simple counsel. Born in Germany in 1873, he immigrated to the United States as a young man and was soon thereafter ordained as a Presbyterian minister. It is interesting that his passage to America was through the generosity of an admirer in Hamburg who felt that only in America could he reach his full potential. Her generosity and prescience were rewarded by Rev Boetker’s unusually long and productive career as both minister and motivational speaker which lasted until his death in 1962. The “Ten Cannots,” reprinted above, was first published by him in 1916 but became a national sensation in a pamphlet, identified with Abraham Lincoln during World War II.

Just wishing our difficulties to pass like the morning mist will not make it happen. I have previously shared with you my unhappiness with the piñata that is the President’s Emergency Economic Rescue Program and my own thoughts on where government pump priming might be effective. I estimate that the program as enacted will add years to our wait for recovery and damage the value of our currency. I expect a credit card crisis to follow on the heels of housing and then a tremendous challenge keeping interest rates in check when the rush of federal dollars does hit the market, but whether it is one year or three, you can be sure that recovery will come, and America’s greatest days are still ahead of us. Meantime, practicing Rev. Boetker’s rules will help us cope and come out better for our effort. We can learn to live with economic stress, to adapt to having less and valuing more our human relationships. Indeed, I expect we may come to prefer it! What we should not do is lose our humanity. What we also should not do is to be ruled by fear and envy or to assume that regulation is any substitute for paying attention to developing the human understanding and wisdom contained in the “Ten Cannots” ourselves and assuring our children learn them too.

While calling forth the best that is within us, Rev Boetcker is not the only man of the cloth to give us words of comfort that provide sage counsel. Dr Adrian Rogers, the only man to serve three times as President of The Southern Baptist Convention, cautioned, “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

While I am not ready to give up on America, there are signs in the editorial pages of newspapers, broadcast media and in Congress that utopian concepts of societal leveling are on the rise. The difference between our country and many others in the past has been that anyone who longed for a fancy car, big house or other sign of the affluent lifestyle did not want to take that from those who had it but aspired to work hard and gain it for themselves. The United States has always been the country of Can Do! Can Be! And Will Be for those with aspirations! Going forward we must nurture that spirit.” The rich in our society don’t pay too little. Contrary to the implicit assumption that the rich don’t pay their fair share of income taxes, data suggests the wealthy are paying well above their proportionate share of national expenses.

The lowest half of taxpayers in 2007 was responsible for only 2.9 percent of income taxes paid. The Top 1 percent, on the other hand, paid 39.89 percent of taxes that year while the top 5 percent (income threshold of $153,542) were responsible for 60.14 percent of all income taxes paid. Additionally the richest Americans, as you might expect, rather than being idle with their wealth are the principle source of the almost 308 billion dollars in measured charity in 2007.

Can colleges such as ours in the low country expect that the generosity that prompted a recent 64 million dollar gift to The College of Charleston will continue under the confiscatory tax regime that liberals believe is their right? Do they assume that when the government doles out the cash, we in our small state would do as well; and what about tomorrow? After you have confiscated the wealth, who will continue to produce it? As a society, we assume we are entitled to spend too much! Let’s get our national spending priorities back into some semblance of fiscal sanity, and the beggar thy neighbor approach to allocating our gross national product that is beginning to threaten the American dream will be less of an issue for all.

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.

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