A Nation Like No Other (16 page)

To give the states broad flexibility in designing the new replacement program, the AFDC's status as an entitlement was ended. The reasoning was simple: states would not be free to redesign their programs if their citizens were entitled to coverage and benefits as specified in federal standards. The reformed program was renamed Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

The reform was opposed bitterly by the liberal welfare establishment, with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Urban Institute, and others predicting the reforms would create a “race to the bottom” among the states and would produce a million starving children within a year.

But quite to the contrary, the reform was immensely successful, exceeding even the predictions of its most ardent supporters. The old AFDC rolls were reduced by two-thirds nationwide, even more in states that pushed work most aggressively. “As a result, in real dollars total federal and state spending on TANF by 2006 was down 31 percent from AFDC spending in 1995, and down by more than half of what it would have been under prior trends,” according to
Forbes
magazine.
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At the same time, because of the resulting increased work by former welfare dependents, child poverty declined every year, falling by 2000 to levels not seen since 1978. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution reports that by 2000 the poverty rate for black children was “the lowest it had ever been.”
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Because of their renewed work effort, the total income of these low-income families formerly on welfare increased by about 25 percent.

There was just one problem with the 1996 reforms: they only reformed one federal program.

The federal government sponsors another 184 means tested welfare programs, including Medicaid, Food Stamps, twenty-seven low-income housing programs, thirty employment and training programs, thirty-four social services programs, another dozen food and nutrition programs, another twenty-two low-income health programs, and twenty-four low-income child care programs, among others.

All these programs could and should be block granted back to the states just as AFDC was in 1996, effectively shedding the federal government of responsibility for welfare. With the states in charge, each one could structure its welfare system to suit its own particular needs and circumstances. State control would also allow states to experiment with different reforms, as real-world results would prove what works and what doesn't. Economic and political competition among the states would lead them to adopt what has proven to work best.

To restore the traditional American incentives to work, save, invest, start and expand businesses, create jobs and produce, America also needs broad based tax reform—namely, an optional 15 percent flat tax, where every taxpayer could choose to file under the new flat rate tax or under the old tax code.

America's traditional work ethic still permeates this country, but it is being undermined by government disincentives. Whether these programs and policies are well-intentioned efforts to help the poor or socialist acts of class warfare, they hurt those they purport to help by devaluing the work ethic. The Founders understood what kind of policies promote a
productive citizenry—low taxes, low debt, low regulation, maximum freedom. We could learn profoundly from their example.

America has risen to become the richest, most powerful country in the world. It owes that achievement to its longstanding belief in the tremendous capacity of individuals to accomplish great things. Our nation's amazing contributions to science, industry, finance, and medicine were not the product of government initiative and bureaucratic control. They came from the genius and labor of individual men and women—many of whom, like Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, started with practically nothing.

The Founders of this great nation envisioned an economic system comprising a wide variety of energetic private interests, all pursuing their own enlightened self-interests under a carefully constructed system of federalism. The government they created was charged with creating a legal and policy environment that would allow the American economy and civil society to flourish.

That government was
not
authorized to become the producer and director of the great drama that is America. And yet the Progressive movement, strongly influenced by the purported “efficiency” of nineteenth-century Prussian “planning,” and later of Soviet “planning,” has embraced a top-down director's role for the government over the lives of the American people.

One of the two great political parties in the United States has essentially abandoned its responsibility to represent the private sector. It is now focused almost entirely on the demands of the public sector—state and federal government employees, their unions, and to the extent the Democrats listen to the private sector at all, the crony capitalists who profit from influencing government.

Government employee unions have become the largest contributors to the Democratic Party's election campaigns and its candidates, followed by a string of other government-related special interest groups. As a result of this fixation on the public sector, for the past several years, state and
federal government employee payrolls have been expanding rapidly, even while job creation and incomes remain stalled among the private-sector workers who pay their salaries.

The political power of this party depends on increasing the percentage of the population that depends on Big Government and that votes to keep it in power. It is now imperative that the American people, who value and honor the legacy of freedom they have received from the Founders, step forward and restore the traditional American commitment to work and independence—or settle for a life of dependency on Hayek's road to serfdom.

W
hen flood waters from Iowa's Cedar River drowned 1,300 city blocks and 4,000 homes in more than four feet of water
blocks and 4,000 homes in more than four feet of water
in June 2008, Christian Fong—the son of a Chinese immigrant and a Nebraska farm girl—acted. A native-born Iowan, Mr. Fong began to organize volunteers in a broad, faith-based initiative to evacuate and care for flood victims.

 

Christian Fong is an everyday American hero. He does not have a cape or a fancy title; he is just a citizen who takes his responsibilities to his community seriously. He showed extraordinary leadership during the Iowa flood, but he could not have done it alone. He tapped into America's greatest resource—individuals voluntarily gathering together within the framework of civil society. With such efforts, the entire community united to save the lives and property of friends, family, neighbors, and strangers.

The community's response in Cedar Rapids is not unique—it's rather common for ordinary Americans to band together to achieve a common purpose. A few years before the Cedar Rapids flood, Hurricane Katrina had struck the Gulf Coast with unprecedented ferocity. In Mississippi, ordinary citizens and civic groups met that challenge head-on and jump-started the region's recovery. Disaster victims were assisted by nearly a million volunteers who donated 10 million man-hours (worth $143 million in labor costs) and $400 million in financial assistance.
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From Catholic Charities USA, the Salvation Army, and the Red Cross to small church congregations and independent volunteers like Compassion First, Americans came together to help those in need. The civic activism in Iowa and the Gulf Coast reflect the kind of energetic civil society that the
Founders believed was a critical component of early American civilization.

The Declaration of Independence does not catalog acceptable and unacceptable pursuits of happiness and does not instruct people on how to live out their freedoms. This was not the concern of the Founders, who focused on limiting government's power to infringe on individual freedom, especially the right of individuals to live their lives as they see fit, including through associations.

Thanks to the Founders' successes and sacrifices, successive generations of Americans have enjoyed the freedom to pursue the good and virtuous life. A brief history of American civil society will show how our dedication to neighbor, community, and country became a hallmark of American Exceptionalism.

America's frontier settlers knew firsthand the value of mutual assistance through informal institutions. As they moved west, pioneers assembled into makeshift communities of wagon trains. Individuals and families created communities by binding their fates together, combining their labors and resources for their mutual defense against the elements and hostile Indian tribes. Notably along the Oregon Trail, pioneers aided each other and provided common defense in the absence of government. When the pioneers set down roots, they created organic communities, with individuals cooperating with each other to erect homes, barns, churches, schools, civic buildings, roads, and bridges.
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Before a formal local government was established in an area, civil society—individuals pursuing a common goal either through an organization or through an informal group—accomplished myriad individual and mutual aims. In the movie
Witness
, the Amish community barn-raising vividly illustrates what had once been a common American experience—dozens of families coming together to build a barn for their neighbor and to share a meal and socialize after the work was done.

The settlers' interdependence did not conflict with the tradition of American individualism. Rather, civil society married the two through a
system of interdependent free institutions and associations. As author Michael Novak notes, the settlers “took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.”
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Such associations were often geared toward ensuring the settlers' physical survival, but others served Americans' intellectual needs, giving rise to scores of schools and educational institutions across the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was energetically involved in such efforts, founding the Junto, an association dedicated to self-improvement and doing social good, and later establishing the American Philosophical Association and the school that would become the University of Pennsylvania.
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Likewise, churches relied on the private generosity of their congregations and the public. St. Patrick's Cathedral, an icon of American Catholicism and New York City architecture, raised much of the funds for its construction through appeals to local Catholics, mostly impoverished Irish immigrants who scrimped and saved their nickels and dimes to help build the majestic church.
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Throughout America, similar instances of collective generosity enabled the creation of museums, hospitals, zoos, charities, and countless other civic-minded institutions.

From its inception, the United States has featured a dynamic civil society comprising a multiplicity of private associations and organic structures. This was one of the most striking and unique features of American life according to Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. He observed, “In the United States associations are established to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion. There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.”
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The Founders' insistence on limited government created the space for this flourishing civic life. In turn, to this day, civic groups check and balance government power by fulfilling roles that government is tempted to assume, and by cultivating habits of personal responsibility that make individuals more capable of challenging government encroachments in their affairs.

In the eighteenth century, governments throughout the world suppressed civic groups as threats to their power. But America was different from the start. As historian Gordon Wood observes, after the American Revolution “newly independent American men and women came together to form hundreds and thousands of new voluntary associations expressive of a wide array of benevolent goals,” including “mechanics societies … orphans' asylums … societies for the promotion of industry, indeed societies for just about anything and everything that was good and humanitarian.” Wood further notes, “There was nothing in the Western world quite like these hundreds of thousands of people assembling annually in their different voluntary associations and debating about everything.”
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