You Decide

And it seized that opportunity. While Republicans had no convincingexplanation for the crisis, seemed responsible for it and had no obvious plansto fix it, the statists offered a full and compelling narrative. OrdinaryAmericans were not to blame for the financial collapse, nor was government. Thereal culprits were Wall Street and the Bush administration, which had gutted theregulatory system that was supposed to keep banks in line.

The solution was obvious: Vote for a new order to expand the powers ofgovernment to rein in the dangerous excesses of capitalism.

It was a convincing story. For a lot of panicky Americans, the prospect of apaternalistic government rescuing the nation from crisis seemed appealing asstock markets and home prices spiraled downward. According to this narrative,government was at fault in just one way: It wasn't big enough. If only there hadbeen more regulators watching the banks more closely, the case went, the economywouldn't have collapsed.

Yet in truth, it was government housing policy that was at the root of thecrisis. Moreover, the financial sector -- where the crisis began and where ithas had the most serious impact -- is already one of the most regulated parts ofour economy. The chaos happened despite an extensive, intrusive regulatoryframework, not because such a framework didn't exist.

More government -- including a super-empowered Federal Reserve, a consumerprotection watchdog and greater state powers to wind down financial firms andpolice market risks -- does not mean we will be safe. On the contrary, suchchanges would give us a false sense of security, especially when Washington, aprimary culprit in the crisis, is creating and implementing the new rules.

The statist narrative also held that only massive deficit spending couldrestore economic growth. "If nothing is done, this recession could linger foryears," Obama warned a few days before taking office. "Only government canprovide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep andsevere. Only government can break the cycle that is crippling our economy."

This proposition is as expensive as it is false. Recessions can and do endwithout the kind of stimulus we experienced, and attempts to shore up theeconomy with huge public spending often do little to improve matters and insteadchain future generations with debt. In fact, all the evidence so far tells usthat the current $787 billion stimulus package has overpromised andunderdelivered, especially when it comes to creating jobs.

If we reject the administration's narrative, the 70-30 nation will remainstrong. If we accept it, and base our nation's policies on it, we will be wellon our way to a European-style social democracy. Punitive taxes and regulationswill make it harder to be an entrepreneur, and the rewards of success will beexpropriated for the sake of greater income equality.

The new statism in America, made possible by years of drift and acceleratedby the panic over the economic crisis, threatens to make us permanently poorer.But that is not the greatest danger. The real risk is that in the new culturewar, we will forsake the third unalienable right set out in our Declaration ofIndependence: the pursuit of happiness.

Free enterprise brings happiness; redistribution does not. The reason is thatonly free enterprise brings earned success.

Earned success involves the ability to create value honestly -- not byinheriting a fortune, not by picking up a welfare check. It doesn't mean makingmoney in and of itself. Earned success is the creation of value in our lives orin the lives of others. Earned success is the stuff of entrepreneurs who seekvalue through innovation, hard work and passion. Earned success is what parentsfeel when their children do wonderful things, what social innovators feel whenthey change lives, what artists feel when they create something of beauty.

Money is not the same as earned success but is rather a symbol, important notfor what it can buy but for what it says about how people are contributing andwhat kind of difference they are making. Money corresponds to happiness onlythrough earned success.

Not surprisingly, unearned money -- while it may help alleviate suffering --carries with it no personal satisfaction. Studies of lottery winners, forinstance, show that after a brief period of increased happiness, their moodsdarken as they no longer derive the same enjoyment from the simple pleasures inlife, and as the glow of buying things wears off.

The same results emerge with other kinds of unearned income -- welfarepayments, for example. According to the University of Michigan's 2001 PanelStudy of Income Dynamics, going on the welfare rolls increases by 16 percent thelikelihood of a person saying that she or he has felt inconsolably sad over thepast month. Of course, the misery of welfare recipients probably goes wellbeyond the check itself. Nonetheless, studies show that recipients are farunhappier than equally poor people who do not receive such government benefits.

Benjamin Franklin (a pretty rich man for his time) grasped the truth aboutmoney's inability by itself to deliver satisfaction. "Money never made a manhappy yet, nor will it," he declared. "The more a man has, the more he wants.Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one."

If unearned money does not bring happiness, redistributing money by forcewon't make for a happier America -- and the redistributionists' theory of abetter society through income equality falls apart.

The goal of our system should be to give all Americans the greatestopportunities possible to succeed based on their work and merit. And that'sexactly what the free enterprise system does: It makes earned success possiblefor the most people. This is the liberty that enables the true pursuit ofhappiness.

To win the culture war, those of us in the 70 percent majority must reclaim-- and proclaim -- the morality of our worldview.

Unfortunately, we often fail to do this. Instead, we sound unabashedlymaterialistic. We talk about growth rates, inflation and investment, while the30 percent coalition walks off with the claims to happiness and fairness.(According to Obama, for example, we need to restore "fairness" to our tax codeby increasing taxes on the wealthy and exempting more people at the bottom frompaying anything.)

The irony is that it is the 30 percent coalition, not the 70 percentmajority, that is fundamentally materialistic. What do they consider thegreatest problem of poor people in America? Insufficient income. What would beevidence of a fairer society? Greater income equality. For the leaders of the 30percent coalition, money does buy happiness -- as long as it is spread evenly.That is why redistribution of income is a fundamental goal and why freeenterprise, which rewards some people and penalizes others, cannot be trusted.

The 70 percent majority, meanwhile, believes that ingenuity and hard workshould be rewarded. We admire creative entrepreneurs and disdain rule-makingbureaucrats. We know that income inequality by itself is not what makes peopleunhappy, and that only earned success can make them happy.

We must do more to show that while we use the language of commerce andbusiness, we believe in human flourishing and contentment. We must articulatemoral principles that set forth our fundamental values, and we must be preparedto defend them.

This defense is already underway, in a disorganized, grass-roots, Americankind of way. Protests against the new statism have flared around the nation formore than a year. And while some have tried to dismiss the "tea party"demonstrations and the town hall protests of last summer as the work ofextremists, ignorant backwoodsmen or agents of the health-care industry, thesemovements reveal much about the culture war that is underway.

Just compare the protests in America with those in Europe. Here, we see teapartiers demonstrating against the government's encroachment on the freeenterprise system and protesting the fact that the state is spending too muchmoney bailing out too many people. Why are people protesting in Greece? Because they want the government to givethem even more. They are angry because their government -- in the face of itsworst economic and perhaps existential crisis in decades -- won't pay the lavishpensions to which they feel entitled. There's no better example of the culturaldifference between America and Europe today, yet it is toward European-stylesocial democracy that the 30 percent coalition wants to move us.