While the image of cat-chasing skydivers is still fresh in our minds, this might be a good time for something Stupid.
After thirty-six years on the air, I’m used to being called everything but a child of God. Offensive? Sure. Insensitive? You bet! Guilty as charged. Life is insensitive; so is the truth. I don’t hide from either.
Well, this chapter ought to certainly stir the puddin’.
Allow me to make an observation that most of you will probably find both offensive and insensitive. I really don’t expect to make any friends here, but maybe I’ll get you thinking.
One day, a long time ago, I asked my listeners to call and tell me what they thought was the most important thing they’d learned listening to talk radio. Then, at one point during the show, a caller turned the tables. He asked me to share the most important thing I had learned hosting a talk show.
My self-editing mechanisms were on the blink that day—not an unusual situation—so I immediately blurted out the first thing that came to mind. I told the caller that the most amazing thing I had learned was how truly ignorant the American people are. Actually, I think I said “stupid” instead of “ignorant.” I’ve since learned that you can’t fix stupid, so “ignorant” is probably the better word. (Even better: I should have said “obtuse.” That way the truly ignorant ones wouldn’t have understood, and I might have hung on to a few more listeners.)
Well, sad to say, things haven’t improved much in the many years since that broadcast. The bulk of talk radio listeners may be better informed than they used to be, but I’m afraid the rest of the American public is as ignorant as ever.
The majority of Americans can’t tell you who the vice president is. Not two out of ten could name one of their two U.S. senators and their congressman. Most Americans still think the United States is supposed to be a democracy.
New Mexico, by the way, is a state.
My opinion was reinforced by a Fox News Opinion Dynamics poll conducted in the fall of 2006, which found that a huge majority of Americans think that our economy is growing worse.
What have they been smoking? At the time of this poll, our economy had just registered a growth rate of 4.4 percent, and these people thought it was in the tank. Employment numbers were up. Manufacturing was up. Government revenue was up. Incomes were up. Home sales were up. Home ownership was at record levels. Poverty was down.
The truth is that our economy is doing amazingly well…and poised to do even better. Yet the majority of Americans don’t realize this. The forecast for economic growth for the last quarter of 2006 was 4.5 to 5 percent. With these numbers, how could anyone say our economy was doing poorly? You could stick what the average American knows about economic matters down an ant’s throat and it would rattle around like a BB in a boxcar.
This is what happens when more Americans get their news from Entertainment Tonight than from any other source.
I’ve come to the reluctant but inescapable conclusion that roughly 50 percent of the adults in this country are simply too ignorant and functionally incompetent to be living in a free society.
You might think I’m off base, but every day around half the people in this country go out of their way to prove me right.
Here’s the depressing twist to this story: Not only are many Americans unequipped to live in a free society, they actually don’t want to live in a free society.
The so-called “love of freedom” we hear about in our patriotic songs and stories is a myth. Americans don’t really want to be free. They have enthusiastically abandoned their sovereignty to the lure of the welfare state. They have no working concept of the responsibilities of individuals who would live free of government tyranny or mob rule. Their ignorance renders them incapable of coping with the responsibilities of liberty.
Many years ago I stopped doing a radio show on July Fourth. I had to stop because I found I was completely incapable of being civil with my listeners. All their flag-waving and independence-celebrating was grating on me, and more often than not I would erupt into an hour-long tirade about what a bunch of hypocrites these flag-wavers were, lining the streets for the parade and waiting for the fireworks.
Freedom? These people want true freedom about as much as they want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Let me just run a few questions by you:
Would you like to bear the entire responsibility for your own retirement? What if we were to eliminate the Social Security program so that you could use that money to invest as you see fit for your retirement years?
No! The vast majority of Americans shrieks in reply.
We got a real taste of our so-called “love of freedom” when President Bush proposed some basic Social Security reforms after the 2004 election.
Bush’s proposal was designed to fix a fundamental flaw in our system: When you include the phony employers’ matching contribution, every American sees about 14 percent of his earnings confiscated for Social Security. The government takes the Social Security taxes it collects and uses the funds to cover Social Security benefits for current retirees. The rest of the money—every penny of it—is then spent. Not one penny is saved. Not one penny is invested. Our politicians simply take the money and hand the Social Security Administration an IOU.
The Social Security trust fund you hear so much about? Doesn’t exist. There is no trust fund. There’s nothing but a stack of IOUs sitting in a gray filing cabinet somewhere in West Virginia. (Not only that, but there’s no law on the books that guarantees that you’ll get back one single penny of the money you paid into Social Security. But I digress…)
Bush’s proposal was simple. Of that 14 percent of your salary the government seizes for Social Security, you would be allowed to take 2 percent and put it into a private account. This account would be yours. You would receive that money no matter what happens to you. The government couldn’t take it away. Die early, and it would go to your heirs. You would invest it for your retirement, and you would choose who gets it if you don’t live long enough to spend it all.
Did “freedom-loving” Americans everywhere rush to embrace this idea?
Hardly.
It was overwhelmingly rejected by the American people. They were simply unwilling to take responsibility for investing even a minuscule 2 percent of their earnings for their own retirement.
I remember watching one thirtysomething woman on the streets of New York being interviewed on the subject by a network news reporter. When asked what she thought about Bush’s partial Social Security privatization plan, she said no thanks. She didn’t want to have to choose where that money would be invested. She said she just wanted the government to take care of it for her.
Music to the politician’s ears!
If Americans truly loved freedom they would not only be embracing the privatization of Social Security, they would be demanding it.
Which brings up all kinds of questions.
Do you like being free to negotiate your own wages? Or would you prefer to have the government or a union handle that for you, too? For far too many Americans, the answer is “No. I don’t want to have to go to my employer and negotiate my own wage. I want the government to set my pay scale, or my union.”
How about health insurance? Do you want your employer to provide you with a health insurance plan, or would you rather just take the money your employer is spending and shop for your own plan in the marketplace? Then again, perhaps you think your health care is the government’s responsibility in the first place. Good luck with that.
Speaking of health care, do you want to be free to choose the doctors who provide you with health care? Or do you want the government to give you a list of people you can choose from, using private sector accreditation agencies if you wish?
Yeah. Just as I suspected. You don’t want to be bothered with researching the credentials of your health care provider yourself. You’ll give up that freedom if the government will just do it for you, right?
You’d probably feel pretty much the same way about choosing an attorney, right?
What about television? Do you want to accept responsibility for choosing what you’re allowed to watch on broadcast TV? Oh, I know. You’re afraid for the children. My God, what if they should see a breast?! I guess you want the government to set the standards there too, right? As long as you still get to watch your sleazy soap opera.
Not that you would need one, but in Alabama and many other states you can’t buy sex toys. You can buy toy guns—and real ones—but not sex toys. Are you okay with that? If you are, what does that say for your love of freedom?
Blue laws. In many states you can’t buy beer or wine from your grocery store on Sunday. Why not? Because someone just might be in a church at the very time you’re popping that top on a cold one. Just whose decision should this be—yours or the government’s?
If you approve of blue laws, don’t talk to me about your love of freedom.
Should your neighbor be able to call up a bookie and place a bet on this Sunday’s Falcons game? If not, why not? How would that hurt you? In fact, what business is it of yours? It’s not your money; it’s his. Why should you have any say in the matter at all?
And—here we go—what about prostitution? A woman, or a man for that matter, can sell her skills in the marketplace, so long as those skills aren’t sexual. Why in the world should prostitution be illegal? Just because you don’t approve? How do you reconcile that with your alleged love of freedom?
Let’s just make this easy. I’m in favor of a Constitutional amendment that would read something like this:
Neither the federal government, nor any state or local government shall make any activity a crime unless said activity violates another person’s right to life, liberty, or property, either through force or fraud.
Could you live with that? Could you live with the thought that anyone in your community could do pretty much what they wish, so long as it doesn’t interfere with anyone else? Now there’s a definition of freedom—and it’s something I suspect most of you just couldn’t go along with.
So spare me your Fourth of July celebrations and fireworks. It’s all so empty. To so many Americans, the love of freedom means nothing more than the love of the thought that other people are doing just what you believe they should be doing, and nothing more.
Freedom means the freedom to succeed, and the freedom to fail. Freedom means the freedom to make bad choices and suffer the consequences, and the freedom to make good choices and enjoy the rewards.
When you want the government to use its police power to protect you from failure and shield you from the consequences of bad choices, then what you really want isn’t freedom at all. Instead of going out and crowing about freedom on the Fourth, maybe you should try staying at home this year and thinking about what you really value.
This country is populated by far too many people who cannot exist at anything other than a basic level without someone else stepping forward to take care of them. They’re adult children. They look upon the government as their mommy and daddy, there to kiss whatever hurts and make sure food is always on the table.1 These people yearn, and deserve, to live in a dictatorship where their fealty to the government is rewarded by lives absent of uncertainty and choice.
Would that dictatorship be a benevolent one? Depends on who seizes power.
All of this causes me to get a bit antsy before any major election.
Why? Because the modern American election is an open invitation for people who haven’t had a working relationship with a clue since their first driver’s test to step up and participate in a decision-making process that will have profound implications for my life and the life of my family long after I’ve been tucked in for the eternal, celestial dirt nap.
Frankly, it scares me to death.
I think it’s safe to say that a good portion of the voters who manage to find their way to a polling place in November do so with one thought in mind: Which one of the people on this ballot can I count on to take the most money away from people I don’t particularly like, and spend that money on me—or give it to me outright?
These people want to escape from the chaos and uncertainty of freedom to a land where the biggest choices they ever have to make are what TV show to Tivo, what to have for dinner, and whether tonight’s entertainment should be a six-pack of Bud or a bottle of Mad Dog.
These are the people I would like to see locked in their homes on Election Day.
For years, I have been a firm advocate of developing a system to limit the people who can vote in this country. These people need to be kept away from ballot boxes before they screw everything up for the rest of us. If we don’t weed out the chaff, soon it’ll be too late.
Why? Among other things, because the rest of us are constantly suffering encroachments on our own freedoms to provide for the survival of the ignorant.
We’re forced to invest (if that’s the word) 15 percent of our paychecks into a disability insurance and retirement plan that would constitute criminal activity in every one of the fifty states if it weren’t run by the government. We must do this, we’re told, because there are just too many people out there who aren’t bright enough to do it on their own.
Moreover, we’re facing the inevitability of socialized medicine. As soon as the Social Democratic party gets its way, with no small amount of help from the Republicans, Americans will be waiting months—if not years—for basic elective surgery. Private citizens will be sent to jail for trying to find a private doctor to treat their ills, outside of the approved and official government plan.
Our freedoms are being lost in the flurry of political pandering to the clueless.
Oh, come on, Neal. Take away our right to vote? You can’t be serious.
You bet your sweet jeans I am. You heard what I said about the so-called “right to vote” earlier. I would like nothing more than to see about half of the registered voters out there have their voter registration cards yanked out of their pockets and burned in front of their eyes.
(And surely by now you know better than to cry “democracy” with me.)
Solutions? You want solutions?
Look, I just came here to grumble. I’m tired of seeing rampant widespread stupidity tear down the greatest attempt at self-government in the history of world civilization. But you’re right—it’s nice to think somebody could do something about this mess.
Surely one improvement would be to build a wall between government and education. Another would be to force prospective voters to prove they have a clue—or even to prove they can play a game of Clue. There’s certainly nothing in our Constitution prohibiting that.
One thing’s for sure: As the ranks of the clueless increase, as more and more Americans opt for security over freedom, as more people surrender their individuality for the ease of running with the mob, the erosion of the liberties, social and economic, that made this country great will proceed apace.
Maybe it’s just time for a good escape plan.