During our first year of marriage, both my wife and I attended college. My wife was twenty-three and had 30 credit hours remaining before graduating in sociology. At twenty-one, I began my first-ever college semester three weeks after we were married. I stood an unwieldy 153 credit hours away from a mechanical engineering degree.
Despite the heavy class loads that awaited us for years to come, we resolved not to let schooling keep us from starting a family. We were young to have kids, by today’s standards, but we were old for our age. My wife had lived on her own in three countries, I in two. Whether we decided to have kids, start a business, or follow dreams of another sort wasn’t what mattered most. We weren’t some sort of tragic or heroic figures. It was what we chose, the life we wanted. To borrow a famous phrase, starting our family when we did was the path we took in “pursuit of happiness.”
We knew that pursuit meant certain challenges. Primarily, we didn’t have any money. As young as we were and with our education unfinished, the best jobs we could find were unskilled and entry-level. Subtracted from our meager earning capacity was the time we dedicated to our university studies.
Despite the challenges, we believed that we could do it. We set out with the romantic idea that with our resourcefulness and work ethic, fueled by the love we had for each other and for the family we would raise, we could construct a life worth living.
In retrospect, it seems almost clichéd, like something from a lazily written nineteenth-century novel based on the out-of-fashion idea of rugged individualism. But our life was real. Certainly the bills in the mail were real. The demands by professors and employers were real. In some ways, our lives could have fit into such a novel, except that I soon discovered that we lived in a more complicated century, and in an America less free.
I worked for a small lawn-care and landscaping company. We mowed lawns at homes, churches, industrial outfits, and some local baseball fields. From time to time, we partnered with a local homebuilder to provide the sprinkler, sod, and shrub installation for their new residential builds.
My wife worked in customer service, answering phones, e-mails, and online chats. The job was with a small local company that provided credit card processing for representatives of direct-sale companies. Her natural kindness and patience served her well while she spent day after day explaining to unwilling Mary Kay ladies how to use a computer to charge a credit card.
The money we earned during that year was more than just paying the monthly bills. We actually made more than we needed to live on. We put in the extra hours because we knew we had precious few months to benefit from two full-time incomes. Our plan was simple: put in the heavy work hours while we could, pay off the car, set aside money for the pending baby, and save as much as we could after that.
Each aspect of the plan was important. The most urgent part was cash for doctor and hospital bills. The most nagging part was the car. The savings would have the biggest long-term impact. We knew once the baby arrived, and as our coursework became more difficult, we would earn less. Setting aside money for the leaner years of college could be the difference between making it and not.
For the plan to work, we couldn’t just earn money, we had to spend it carefully. We moved into a studio apartment, chose a cut-rate landline over cell phones, and found other ways to hold down our expenses.
One day, after coming home from work, I carefully crept through the living/bedroom on the way to the shower, cautious not to jar the grass clippings loose from my clothes. In the bathroom, I was surprised to find my wife kneeling at the tub, scrubbing and sloshing several pairs of pants. I asked her what she was doing. She explained that doing some of our dirty laundry in the bathtub helped her stretch out the time between Laundromat runs.
As we knelt side-by-side on that and other occasions, we couldn’t help but chuckle at the simplicity in which we lived. It helped us appreciate what we did have. “You know,” I used to say, “we may do laundry in our bathtub, but in many ways, we live better than the emperors of history.” Kristin usually just smiled, knowing I was giving us both a pep talk. The encouragement worked, because it was basically true. No other people in history—or most in the world at the time—had so many material blessings. We traveled in the speed and comfort of cars. The best entertainment in the world was available at the local dollar movie theater. We could even control the temperature in our home. During those times on our knees at the bathtub, we tried to remember that in many ways not even Egypt’s pharaohs or Rome’s caesars had it as good.
Regardless of what amenities we could or couldn’t afford, our focus was on each other and the baby we were preparing to care for. So even though we often concentrated on earning and saving dollars, it wasn’t about money—at least not in any sense that I had ever thought of money before.
I began to think of money in terms of the decisions I made and their alternatives. Never before did life present so many difficult choices. How much studying was enough? How much work would be enough? In truth, there would never really be enough time for either, and yet we had to figure out how to do both. Most important, our young marriage also needed cultivation.
At times, the relentless demands of our schedules forced us to look at other options. We had enough money for our current needs. School deadlines seemed so much more urgent than earning money for bills that wouldn’t arrive for months or even years. Spending time with Kristin was far more appealing than long Saturdays of lawn-mowing. Working less seemed so much easier.
But the dollars-and-cents reality of our situation meant that letting up was giving up. We had too many bills (tuition, books, rent, etc.) to expect that we could pay them without a wholehearted commitment to the plans we had made.
We achieved most of our goals. By the time our little girl, Isabel, was born, we had the money to pay hospital and doctor bills and owned our car outright. We even did well enough in school to get a little bit of scholarship money based on grades. But we weren’t able to build much reserve cash. I didn’t give much thought to our savings at the time. I supposed we didn’t quite make enough or spent too much. We knew that accumulating money on top of paying for the car and baby was going to be difficult. Dollars can only stretch so far.
A few months went by. Kristin went back to work for about ten-fifteen hours per week. I kept my work hours in the upper thirties and started a new semester of school. We moved into what seemed like a palatial two-bedroom basement apartment. We had our new daughter to keep us company. (We thought the preparation for her arrival was exhausting, but she taught us what sleepy really meant.) Before long, she was sleeping more regularly, smiling at us, and lighting up our lives in a million different ways.
Tax time soon arrived. Our W-2s came in the mail. We determined which tax forms we should use and picked them up, along with their corresponding instructions, at our local library. Since we had few write-offs and didn’t itemize our deductions, preparing our return was simple.
Once we completed our 1040 form, we wished it were more complicated, at least if that meant the taxes turned out differently. We reworked the numbers over and over, hoping to find a mistake. (We felt like something had to be wrong.) Our tax liability (mostly payroll) was more than we had paid in rent over the entire year.
I stared vacantly at the forms, as if to look right through the numbers. I thought about our grand plans and all we did to try and make them a reality. I remembered Kristin, who week after week put in forty or more hours of work. As her pregnancy progressed—as it happens with many expectant mothers—sleep began to be elusive and headaches and backaches became more persistent and severe. She fought through it. Her final full workweek ended just a few hours before she went into labor.
I remembered the times that year when, to push just a little bit harder, I worked until dark, after the rest of the crew went home. My lifeless arms were blackened with drying mud from sod slabs I laid down throughout the afternoon. My knees and the heels of my palms were raw from working on all fours. While dusk provided welcome relief from the day’s relentless heat, it was a reminder of just how short some days seemed to be. Even as I loaded up the truck to stop work for the day, hours of homework and studying remained before I could lay my worn-out frame in bed.
We put our sincerest efforts into earning that money. The anemic balance in our bank account took on a new meaning. It wasn’t simply a matter of earning too little or spending too much. The savings we worked to accumulate were sitting on Line 4 of our W-2s. We took some consolation in knowing we had actually earned the money. Unfortunately, we couldn’t pay tuition bills with consolation.
That time in our life acted as a catalyst for me, not just personally but politically. When I was growing up, my parents were civically active, so I was somewhat aware of politics. But my interest level intensified when I had my own family to care for. The suddenly debilitating weight of government forced me to engage in ways I hadn’t before.
Over the next few years, I set out to answer certain fundamental questions about government. Our experiences needed context, not just because they were so important to me and Kristin, but because they could be the experiences of anyone. While the specifics of each person’s goals were bound to be different from ours, we were alike in that we all sought to make a life for ourselves.
To understand the events of our first year together, I had to clear away the muck of modern political convention. A story like ours was ideal fodder for politicians. The young couple, working while struggling through college as they prepare for their first child, scarcely able to make ends meet. It was the kind of human-interest tale that landed people in the gallery at a State of the Union address.
Situations like ours were politically useful because they engendered so much sympathy. Even we felt sorry for ourselves, for a time. During our brooding, we grumbled that people in a situation as difficult as ours should get a break. But the fact that we were sympathetic characters should not have entitled us to special treatment. We had no right to demand special benefits where doing so imposed injustice upon others.
Unfortunately, most political solutions were based on the favored treatment of one citizen over another. Policies such as increased grants for college students or hosts of other subsidies put a premium on certain kinds of people (usually those who invoked political sympathy). I knew that was a line of thought I could not endorse.
I had to go further back in time. I needed to look at the world outside the perspective of one year’s tax return or a two-, four- or six-year election cycle. I analyzed the ideas of several influential philosophers, politicians, and authors. Of all the variations, details, and emphases of the various thinkers I studied, two principal worldviews emerged in every case.
According to the first philosophy, a just society could only exist if its members had the right to do what they wished with what they earned. The second philosophy dictated that for a just society to exist, some of what people earned must be taken so that all could be maintained in relative economic equality.
The second vision was more in line with the political answers I found so hollow. Our circumstances exposed the logistical impossibilities of trying to guarantee minimum benefits for 300 million people. A centrally administered redistributive tax system could never know us or our plans well enough to do less harm than good over the long term. We were forced to pay thousands of dollars in taxes instead of making provisions for our difficult financial future. A social safety net designed to give personal aid could scarcely have been more impersonal.
Once the taxes were collected, we faced the demoralizing option of returning to the government to beg for the money back through Pell Grants, Earned Income Credit, food stamps, Medicaid, or other programs. Our sustenance and prosperity were delinked from our own faculties and efforts and tied to a bureaucrat’s actuarial table. The system, meant to be humane, disregarded the very qualities that defined us as humans.
Besides the detached, bureaucratic nature of government taxes and payouts, there remained the weightier matter of freedom. I heard arguments that the bevy of federal safety net programs made Americans more free. As Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’”
President Roosevelt’s archetypal statement begged what to me was a very profound question: at what cost would this economic freedom be purchased?
Put simply, for the government to ensure economic security it had to collect and redistribute taxes. But what precisely were taxes? In the tumult of political rhetoric about the necessity of aiding one group or another, many had lost sight of what it was that the IRS really does. The events early in our marriage provided me a powerful lesson in what the government was taking.
The health of our bank account, the balance of our car loan, and our readiness to pay doctor and hospital bills were external indicators that answered core questions about who we were. It is true that we were just working jobs and paying bills, but the routineness of it all shouldn’t distract from its larger significance. It was in our daily tasks, which often left us physically and mentally spent, where we found out the depth of our dedication, love, and perseverance. The money we earned wasn’t just ours, it was us, an extension of who we were no less than fingers are an extension of a hand.
The vision described by President Roosevelt relied upon taking the sweat of one man’s brow and giving it to another as his own. Cries of necessity merely served as a smokescreen, covering up the true nature of a redistributive system. Certainly clothing was a necessity for the inhabitants of England and America in the early and mid-nineteenth century. But that necessity was no justification for the means whereby cotton was produced at such low prices in the Antebellum South.
Roosevelt’s brand of freedom could only exist by subjugating one citizen to another—hardly freedom’s ideal. This dichotomy was not new. Abraham Lincoln summarized the two views this way:
“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things.”
After I experienced men doing as they pleased with what we had worked so hard to earn, it was clear to me which vision embodied freedom and which was built on a lie. True justice was only possible in the society that protected the product of each person’s labor.
In the end, we made it through college. We welcomed a second child during my senior year. Kristin continued her part-time work until I landed my first engineering job. My wage was high enough for us to live on and, with plans to add a third little one, we decided it was a good time for her to take a break from the labor force.
The experiences of our college years left a deep imprint on me. In many ways, I feel lucky to have had such a difficult ordeal. Had we been more personally prosperous or less intent on walking an uphill financial path, the realities of life and the difference between freedom and servitude might not have been so clear. As it happened, our life has spurred me to defend the right of all Americans to carve out their own lives, free from the repressive hand of government.