The American Dream

Achieving the American Dream through hard work, courage and determination is in danger of being replaced by the Marxist slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Increased government intervention into our lives, by both political parties, makes the real American Dream more difficult to attain and decreases our motivation to even pursue it. The mindset has been slowly changed from being accountable for your pursuit of happiness to feeling entitled to happiness.

In a recent campaign speech, Hillary Clinton made some shocking admissions of her vision for the United States which I believe to be counterintuitive to the American Dream.

Excerpts from speech:
"It's also important to understand these [the Bush Administration] policies are consistent with the administration's theory about how we should manage our economy: leave it all up to the individual.

That's why they want to privatize Social Security and let individuals bear the risks. It's why their answer to the health care crisis is limited to creating health savings account, which allows the healthiest people to get the best deal, with little concern if the sickest get worse.

They call it the ownership society. But it's really the "on your own" society.

It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an "on your own" society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a "we're all in it together" society.”

What is wrong with bearing the risk for your own retirement? Charles Koch, chairman and CEO of one of the world’s largest private companies, brought up a great point in an interview on the Michael Medved show.  Mr. Koch was asked how he would apply his business principles to reforming Social Security.  He said that he would take into account that when individuals are accountable for their savings, some may make mistakes.  Mistakes are something to be learned from and other individuals can heed those lessons so that they do not make the same mistake.  However, when a big government program makes a mistake, it is catastrophic across the board.

That was a very logical observation by Mr. Koch that could be applied to all government programs.  Innovative and free market approaches can be taken to make medical insurance privatized in the same manner that auto, life, and property insurance are with subsidies available for those at the poverty level.  Why is Mrs. Clinton’s American Dream to redistribute income and create entitlement programs?

Below are some quotes that capture what the American Dream once was:

President Abraham Lincoln:
"The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This…is free labor--the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all."

How is someone going to save money and reinvest it when Hillary’s programs may require 40 cents of every dollar earned to go the federal government?

James Truslow Adams: Writer and Historian (believed to be the coiner of the phrase “The American Dream”) in his book The Epic of America which was written in 1931:

"The American Dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

United States’ Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers: "…held certain truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Novelist Thomas Wolfe: "…to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity ….the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him."