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Imprimis, On Line
Special Edition, November 1993
IMPRIMIS (im-pri-mis), taking its name from the Latin
term, "in the first place," is the publication of
Hillsdale College. Executive Editor, Ronald L.
Trowbridge; Managing Editor, Lissa Roche; Assistant,
Patricia A. DuBois. Illustrations by Tom Curtis. The
opinions expressed in IMPRIMIS may be, but are not
necessarily, the views of Hillsdale College and its
External Programs division. Copyright 1993. Permission
to reprint in whole or part is hereby granted, provided
a version of the following credit line is used:
"Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly
journal of Hillsdale College." Subscription free upon
request. ISSN 0277-8432. Circulation 480,000 worldwide,
established 1972. IMPRIMIS trademark registered in U.S.
Patent and Trade Office #1563325.
---------------------------------------------
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
Special Edition
---------------------------------------------
A Special Message From_
Stanley D. Crow
Attorney at Law
---------------------------------------------
In recent years you and I have participated together in
campaigns to prevent the establishment of an Idaho
state lottery (we lost) and casino gambling (we won).
When we undertook those campaigns, we had many good
reasons to do so, but among them was our mutual desire
to uphold and preserve traditional values--the values
that make the difference between a society that thrives
and one that wanes, between a society that is blessed
with honor and one that is cursed with disrespect, and
between a society that encourages vigorous virtues and
one that degrades into malaise and dysfunction.
The founders of our nation had carefully
considered the teaching of centuries concerning how man
should relate to God, how man should relate to man, and
how government should encourage those right
relationships. In turn, they created a governmental
system that both presupposed a moral, upright, and
self-responsible citizenry and that strived, until
comparatively recently, to preserve those conditions.
As our government has let us down, you and I and
many others have stepped forward to fill the gap. One
of the most effective in doing so is Dr. George Roche,
whom I regard to be a philosopher of and for our times
and a hero in the truest sense of the word. As
president since 1971 of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale,
Michigan, Dr. Roche has led his school to become one of
the leading, if not the leading, institutional
proponents and exponents of the interrelated causes of
freedom for the individual, Judeo-Christian values for
individuals and society, and a deep understanding of
and firm commitment to the heritage of Western
civilization.
Through its own determined fight to be completely
independent of government regulation and funding,
through its renowned academic and public policy
seminars both on campus and around the nation, through
its brilliant exposition of the values that underlie
free enterprise, through its academic rigor, and
through its many publications--including the books of
Dr. Roche and others and this Imprimis you hold in your
hands--Hillsdale College has provided all of us with an
inspiring example and the means of victory.
I believe this so strongly that I have arranged
for you to have a free subscription to the monthly
Imprimis, at no cost or obligation if you so desire.
Simply return the postpaid business reply envelope
inside and join me as a faithful and appreciative
Imprimis reader.
Sincerely,
Stanley D. Crow
---------------------------------------------
"Capitalism and the Future of America"
By George Roche, President, Hillsdale College
---------------------------------------------
The brilliant young economist George Gilder has written
that the most important event in recent history is "the
demise of socialist dream." However, he also notes
"_the failure of capitalism to win a corresponding
triumph."
Why is this so, when capitalism has so obviously
provided more material benefits for every individual,
regardless of economic or social condition, than any
other system in the history of the world? Why, when
capitalism's intellectual defense has been so ably
undertaken by some of the greatest minds of our time is
socialism, thinly disguised, still taught in our
schools and promoted by our politicians? And why, when
capitalism's results are so demonstrably humanitarian,
is it still seen as a symbol for greed and
exploitation? The perplexing answers to these questions
share a common root: They all lie in the realm of
ideas. Ideas, I find myself often saying, rule the
world--not armies, not economics, not politics, not any
of the things to which we usually give our allegiance,
but ideas.
"Ideas have consequences"--in just three words
Richard Weaver encapsulated an entire philosophy of
life that is also a challenge, a call to action for all
of us. Throughout history there have been formative
moments in which particular ideas and particular
leaders exert a profound impact on the character and
events of a nation. These special epochs, marked by the
emergence of a new consensus, can readily be found in
American history. The first great sea-change in
American society occurred fully 150 years before the
American Revolution when our colonial ancestors enjoyed
a large measure of self-government. From the start, the
American colonial experience had drawn heavily upon the
traditional liberties of British subjects and upon
their rich heritage of individual freedom guaranteed by
the Magna Carta.
By the eighteenth century, however, the British
were pursuing a different goal. A new economic idea,
mercantilism, dominated British thinking. Government
planning and control regulated society and manipulated
individuals. Eventually, the American colonists ran out
of patience with this growing governmental interference
in their affairs. During the summer of 1776, Thomas
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a
revolutionary document destined to represent liberty
for the American republic as long as it should endure.
Coincidentally, during that same summer in 1776, a
book was published thousands of miles away from the
American colonies, a book destined to have a profound
effect on America. The author, Adam Smith, was a
professor of moral philosophy at the University of
Glasgow, and the book was The Wealth of Nations. As a
moral philosopher, Smith contended that men must be
free to make their own decisions because, if they are
not, a moral paralysis soon sets in. From this basic
truth, he examined mercantilism and discovered that
this early form of the planned economy was denying men
freedom of choice and thus distorting British society.
Eleven years later, fifty-five men met in Philadelphia
to draft our Constitution. Motivated primarily by the
ideas articulated by Jefferson and Smith, our Founding
Fathers charted our national path toward limited
government, the dignity of free men, and the marvelous
prosperity we have enjoyed in this country.
The next great sea-change in our nation's history
occurred around the turn of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, these new ideas favored the collective
over the individual, redirecting America on an
increasingly hazardous path as the century progressed.
The setting was ripe. For years, as America's
industries boomed, immigrants poured in and cities
mushroomed, it began to seem to some that the scale of
life itself had so magnified that the common man no
longer had a fair chance to get ahead in the world. Far
from what one might expect, the momentum for
collectivism was imparted not by public figures but by
little-known men of ideas whose names not one in a
hundred Americans would recognize.
In certain elite circles, some wondered whether
the answers for America's growing pains might not lie
elsewhere than in the common sense of the Founding
Fathers and the time-tested traditions of our Judeo-
Christian heritage--and whether those answers might not
instead be found in the work of certain "daring"
European thinkers like Marx, Darwin, and Freud whose
ideas had rocked the Old World during the 1800s.
So a relative handful of professors and
intellectuals, writing in the first years of this
century and drawing on iconoclastic theories already
well advanced in Europe, brought those ideas to America
and began a process that remade the face of American
society within thirty years, roughly between 1900 and
1930. These collectivist ideas spread from a few
seminal thinkers, to the second- and third-hand
purveyors of ideas--teachers, ministers, the working
press--the word wielders. The collective mentality
continued to spread, reaching the professions, the
business community, the courts, the novelists, the
artists, the general public and last--always last--the
politicians.
Of the first seminal thinkers of the new era, John
Dewey has had a lasting impact on our philosophy, our
education, our culture, and, ultimately, our
government. From his "progressive school" experiment of
the mid-1890s at the University of Chicago, Dewey
advocated a system of education which would produce a
new generation of Americans with a preference for group
and social activity and who viewed themselves not as
individuals but as members of a "total democratic
society." He emphasized the unfinished nature of
society and the universe and called for "a new kind of
religion" to be derived from human experience and
relationships.
Dewey's intellectual colleagues were themselves
busy on other fronts. At Col-umbia, anthropologist Ruth
Benedict and her mentor Franz Boas were developing the
ideas that man could be understood only as a social
animal, since his character was allegedly the exclusive
creation of his society and environment. Charles
Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
was another key turning point. He set aside the
traditional ideas of American society in favor of an
essentially Marxian philosophy of history in which the
Founding Fathers were portrayed as having placed the
economic welfare of a few ahead of the total social
welfare of all.
The flamboyant Thorstein Veblen poured out his
bitter frustration on the business community in shrill
anticapitalist diatribes like The Theory of the Leisure
Class. Meanwhile, Veblen's fellow economists John R.
Commons and Richard Ely pioneered in charting a vastly
expanded role for organized labor in the new
collectivity.
Sociologist Lester Frank Ward, one of the true
patron saints of the modern American collectivist
ideal, saw politics as a manipulating device designed
to control all society, stating: "Modern society is
suffering from the very opposite of paternalism--from
under-government." In Ward, all those years ago, we
thus find the original germ of an idea that has been
central to the social planner's rhetoric from the New
Deal era to the Clinton era.
By 1932, the year the arch-collectivist and
political pragmatist Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected
president, the intellectual revolutionaries had already
done their work, and they rapidly became the new
political establishment. Under FDR, the new generation
of intellectuals managed to use the Depression as a
pretext for a massive collectivization of American
society throughout the decade of the 1930s. They failed
to cure the Depression, but a "fortunate" circumstance-
-World War II--did it for them. After the war, the
social engineers stood ready with further collectivist
gimmicks such as the Full Employment Act of 1946.
There was steady pressure throughout the Truman
years for major expansion of the federal role in
health, in education, and in welfare--pressure that
finally resulted in new government programs under the
succeeding Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Thus Eisenhower proved once again that Republican
administrations usually ratify rather than reverse the
collectivist inroads of their Democratic predecessors.
The same pattern of ratification and acceleration was
repeated two decades later when the Nixon and Ford
administrations helped consolidate most of Lyndon
Johnson's Great Society programs, exacerbated the oil
crisis and other economic woes through an unprecedented
program of peacetime wage-and-price controls, and
presided over the regulatory explosion of the early
1970s.
In the last months of the Reagan presidency, we
wondered if the pattern had been repeated. Many saw
Reagan's election in 1980 and his subsequent reelection
in 1984 as genuine evidence of Americans'
disenchantment with government, a disenchantment that
cuts across ideological lines and is an inevitable
reaction to the love affair with statism that has been
carried on for so long. But whatever one thinks in
retrospect of Reagan's actual accomplishments, it is
uncertain whether much has changed. Critics on the left
have declared that the end of the Reagan era signaled
the end of conservatism's brief resurgence.
Undeniably the idea of capitalism, a central tenet
of conservatism, remains under constant assault, and
its detractors comprise a majority in our schools, our
media, and even our political and cultural leadership
communities. One faction we may dub the "anti-
capitalists," those who regard the redistribution of
wealth in the name of "economic justice" as the proper
goal of all economic activity. They claim that modern
capitalism began with the Industrial Revolution and
heralded child labor, wage slavery, urban squalor and a
Hobbesian existence for the working class. The late
20th century, they insist, is still an era of
exploitation.
A second group, however, focuses less on
capitalism's evils than its supposed inadequacies. It
is all right to defend free enterprise, so the
reasoning goes, but today there are simply too many
demands on the system--too many poor, too many
problems, too many inequities--for individuals or the
free market to handle. Government must, therefore, step
in and act as the problem-solver. Far more people
belong to this group than the first. They have accepted
the need for intervention even though they may harbor
no hostility to capitalism.
Both groups are obsessively results-oriented. They
begin with the premise that the world is perfectible
and that man possesses the means to perfect it through
his own reason and through man-made institutions.
Capitalism simply cannot fulfill their expectations.
Yet no amount of intellect and no economic system--no
man-made system at all, for that matter--can cure every
ill the world produces; it probably can't even cure
half of them. Sadly, the false notion persists that
some other system, some other grand vision, can achieve
the impossible.
The central idea of capitalism does not lie in the
miracle of the market or even the ingenuity of the
entrepreneur. It rests, rather, on the fundamental
principle of freedom. One of the great sources of
strength for America has been our commitment to
economic, political, and religious freedom. Within our
open society, individuals are free to provide for
themselves and their families, to compete with others
and to join with them in voluntary associations. We
have been free to support those professions,
businesses, schools, hospitals, churches, and cultural
institutions which best meet our individual needs and
preferences. In other words, we have prospered with
competition and voluntary association in the private
sector. The American economy, despite its ups and downs
and the serious threats it faces from over regulation,
the deficit, and the other problems of our times, has
worked beautifully--beyond the wildest dreams of the
utopian social planners. But it has worked precisely
because we have allowed individuals to act freely on
their own.
Self-transcendence is the ability to rise above
the merely animal, merely physical self and freely
choose the conditions and terms of our own existence,
to decide what is of ultimate importance and act upon
it whether or not other people understand, whether or
not it is dangerous, whether or not it makes us rich.
Only human beings have that capacity. Only you and I
do. We have the capacity to rise above our merely
physical selves.
Self-transcendence, based on individual choice,
touches every aspect of our lives. If economic
transactions were based on the immediate cave man rip-
off--the idea that I want to grab all I can get, and I
want to get it right now, and I will not honor any
obligation that interferes with this--no long-term
economic planning would be possible. No investment,
nothing of what we call a capital structure, could ever
come into existence, unless legal contracts were
honored. That necessitates self-transcending people,
people willing to honor their commitments.
That is the leadership commitment we are
discussing. All civilization is based upon the
integrity of the self-responsible individual, directed
by a view of justice, of restraint, and of
responsibility.
There was a time when this country of ours valued
such an idea. It placed its faith in the responsible
individual and the institutional structure, giving form
to our lives. And it is the erosion of that faith which
today destroys us from within. I submit to you that
unless we recover it, all the methods in the world to
do something better economically, technologically, or
socially are just so much spitting in the wind.
We must insist upon a return to a hierarchy of
values which gives primacy to the dignity of the
individual and to the instructional forms which
guarantee that dignity.
It is here that the free market, private property,
private institutions--that whole private sector idea--
has special validity, because it does leave people free
to build their own voluntary associations, to be
uniquely self-transcending, to get on with the dignity
of leading their own lives.
Remember, then, when we as leaders are talking
about the private sector, that we are committed to it
not because it works, though it works very well. All
kinds of economic arguments demonstrate that the free
market provides prosperity. It solves social problems.
It works. But that is not the argument that we should
advance. People are not inspired by the argument that
they will have more refrigerators if they are free men.
Our message must not be that the free market is good
because it works, but rather that it works because it
is good--because it has the fundamentally proper view
of human nature.
This is what capitalism offers for our American
future. Together we can invest our resources and
energies in a system which provides a level of
prosperity and personal dignity unheralded in the
history of the world. Its legacy of freedom, passed
from one generation to the next, is now ours to defend
for our children, and for all who will follow.
---------------------------------------------
George Roche has served as president of Hillsdale
College since 1971 and in the last two decades has
attracted international attention for his battle to
protect the school from federal intrusion. (Despite the
fact that Hillsdale has never accepted federal funds,
the Supreme Court has challenged Hillsdale's
independence.) Firing Line, the MacNeil-Lehrer News
Hour, News-week, the New York Times, Reader's Digest,
Time, Today, the Wall Street Journal, and scores of
other television, radio, magazine, and newspaper
sources have chronicled his efforts.
Formerly the presidentially-appointed chairman of
the National Council on Educational Research, the
director of seminars at the Foundation of Economical
Education in New York, a professor of history at the
Colorado School of Mines, and a U.S. Marine, George
Roche is also the author of 10 books on education,
history, philosophy, and government, including America
by the Throat: The Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy
(1985), Going Home (1986), A World Without Heroes: The
Modern Tragedy (1987), A Reason for Living (1989), and
One by One: Preserving Values and Freedom in Heartland
America (1990).
###
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End of this special edition of Imprimis, On Line;
Information about the electronic publisher,
Applied Foresight, Inc., is in the file, IMPR_BY.TXT
For the November 1993 issue, there is the normal issue
of Imprimis issued by Hillsdale College.
See the file, IMPR9311.TXT
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