Getting America Right
By Kate Campaigne
If you want a handy overview of basic conservative thought, replete with alarming examples of how our government has fastened its “ever-growing tentacles” onto the American people, read Getting America Right: The True Conservative Values Our Nation Needs Today. Authored by Ed Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation, and Doug Wilson, Chairman of Townhall.com, the book will leave most readers dumbfounded and shaking their heads in disbelief at the extent of today’s federal programs. The authors emphasize how terribly far the federal government has wandered from our country’s founding principles, and how it has begun to destroy the resourcefulness and self-reliance that was once the backbone of the American people.
Getting America Right not only reveals irresponsible spending, useless and harmful federal programs, and wasteful measures, but also provides solutions and advocates specific action. Moreover, the authors offer six fundamental questions that every citizen and policymaker must ask before proposals become policy:
1. Is federal action necessary?
2. Does this measure promote self-reliance?
3. Is it responsible?
4. Does it make us more prosperous?
5. Does it make us safer?
6. Does it unify us?
Getting America Right shows that big government, regardless of its benevolent goals, is inefficient and tears apart the fabric of our society. When self-reliant families and their communities wither or collapse under its weight, our nation suffers. Big government “benevolence” fosters dependent people, not the innovative and self-reliant population upon whom our prosperity depends.
Feulner and Wilson expose bad policies in education, Social Security, military spending, taxes, welfare, immigration, and nearly every other arena where the government has stepped in. They convincingly demonstrate that when big government dominates its citizens, it ultimately destroys itself. A nation is only as strong as her people, and when the people are turned into virtual serfs, the nation fails.
Getting America Right advises the American people and its representatives to act in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity: the national government should refrain from taking any action that can be performed at lower levels—the states, cities, neighborhoods, or families. Further, the study of subsidiarity should be remedial education for government officials and think-tank academics, and instilled into the political faith of every American. Feulner and Wilson supply the metrics of how big government causes adverse results and how the decline of our country, socially and economically, has begun. This book is both a manifesto shouting “Stop!” and a guide to changing direction.
There is, of course, a need for government. Feulner and Wilson aren’t extreme libertarians, and they’re not recommending that we take a demolition ball to Washington. Rather, they’re begging us to return to the limited national government that America’s founders envisioned.
Do you really want a Social Security system that returns less than you put in? Do you support more than $2 million in federal taxes going towards “Golfing for World Peace,” or $439 million (since 1986) going to the International Fund for Ireland? What about the federally funded “Goofy Award?”
With their six questions as guideposts, the authors shed light on what looks like an insurmountable feat: how to get back to limited government. The answer rests in holding fast to the principle of subsidiarity and following the ideals that made our nation great: free enterprise, individual freedom, limited government, strong national defense, the rule of law, and promoting the values of our Judeo-Christian heritage. That, after all, is what our founders ultimately relied upon in their hopes for a “shining city on a hill.”
Two quotes remained with me after setting aside Getting America Right. Thomas Jefferson once stated, “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” The second quote, from Milton Friedman, argued that “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own.” We must take these wise words seriously and scrutinize the state of our government. Feulner and Wilson not only urge Congress and the President to reverse the tide of expanding government, but charge you, dear reader, with the responsibility to become involved in this grand restoration effort as well.
Kate Campaigne is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.
