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If only we will...

By: Jim Waters (Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions)

Like undisturbed snow, the new year lies glistening before us full of hope and challenges. The hope provided by liberty to its partakers has not changed much throughout history. Wherever freedom reigns, prosperity, faith and great accomplishments necessarily follow.

However, just as the great blessings of liberty have not changed, its foes are forever present. Liberty’s challenges have never been portrayed better than by Alexander Tyler, a Scottish professor. In 1787, the same year our own Constitution was ratified, he made this prediction:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy.”

Tyler’s claim was prophetic. The right of Americans to liberty and self-determination, guaranteed by our Constitution, is threatened today by a welfare mentality that is consuming our nation’s political process and threatening its economic vitality. Too often, candidates win elections because they find a way to seduce their constituents into greater dependence upon government by flinging open the doors of the public treasury. Those running for offices who want to eliminate wasteful spending and limit the intrusion of government find it increasingly difficult to compete.

This mentality is hard at work in Kentucky. Gov. Ernie Fletcher must exhibit exemplary courage in the days ahead to stand his ground while insisting that wasteful government spending and unnecessary government programs be eliminated. This is a worthy goal, but one that is threatened by a dispassionate constituency. Kentuckians have the resources, knowledge and skill to address and solve the future’s challenges. If only we will…

History shows that liberty erodes when citizens become apathetic.

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years,” Tyler said. “These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back into bondage.”

Nations scattered throughout history confirm Tyler’s statement. Egypt, Greece and Rome fell because of a lack of vigilance over freedom’s flame in times of abundance.

Such indifference was a great concern of our nation’s founders. At the same time they pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor in defense of liberty and civil society, they worried about the durability of the freedom they were creating.

“We have given you a republic – if you can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. What did he mean?

Franklin profoundly understood that the greatest threat to our liberty would not come from tyrants from without but from indifference from within. It rears its ugly head in the form of complacency, as a miserly 25 percent voter turnout at the polls or with a shrug of their shoulders saying, “What can one person do?” It’s an apathy that watches listlessly as our liberties shrink and encroaching government overwhelms like a cancer. This lack of concern threatens our ability to live in a surrounding where self-determination, economic prosperity and personal responsibility harmonize to create civil society.

“As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom,” said Lyn Nofziger, a former White House Press Secretary during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

The Bluegrass Institute exists, in part, because few citizens actively involve themselves in the arena of public policy debate. As government grows more intrusive – requiring seat belts, prohibiting smoking, telling businesses when to open and close, searching us as we enter public buildings, etc., etc, etc. – we seek to defend human liberty.

We know these intrusions are the symptoms of a larger disease. The greatest enemy to our freedom today is not higher taxes, an addiction to overspending, suffocating regulations or an ineffective education system. Those are issues for which the Bluegrass Institute was formed to address and looks forward to vigorously confronting in the coming year. Rather, freedom’s greatest foe is in the complacency and apathy that has too often found a warm and inviting place among us.

Liberty is our birthright as long as we strive to defend it. We hope 2004 is a year of re-conviction embracing our most important resolution: “We have been given a Commonwealth. We are determined to keep it!”

http://bipps.org/

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