When asked who first articulated The Heartland Institute’s vision of the role government should play in human affairs, I have no trouble naming names: John Locke, James Madison, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson (with help from Benjamin Franklin) said it clearly some 227 years ago:
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. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it …
Of course, this vision of limited government and maximum individual freedom leaves room for interpretation, debate, and mischief. But you can set your compass by it, and the rest is just rowing.
Many people–some on the political right, but more on the political left–aren’t so lucky. Inventing a “new” or “original” vision for what government should do is their preoccupation. Earlier this month, for example, The New York Times Magazine carried a long article titled “Notion Building,” which provides some insight into what today’s Left thinks about the Founding Fathers’ vision.
Confusion on the Left
The article describes a new “progressive” think tank being launched by John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton. The acknowledged models for what Podesta is trying to do are conservative and libertarian think tanks: Cato, Heritage, Reason, and perhaps even The Heartland Institute. These organizations changed the political debate by presenting new evidence and arguments in favor of more freedom and less government.
Podesta’s liberals are struggling with what President George Bush Senior famously called “the vision thing.” A senior policy advisor to one of the Democratic Presidential candidates is quoted saying “we’re just not generating any exciting new vision.” Gary Hart told the reporter, “somebody had an idea about health care. Somebody had an idea about education. But nobody has pulled it all together.”
Laura Nichols, the senior vice president for this new think tank (she just happens to have been one of Dick Gephardt’s top aides), says producing sound bites and getting on the cable talk shows “is not going to solve [our] problem of what the long-term progressive vision is.” She says liberals must challenge their first assumptions, even “reinvent the wheel.”
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is quoted as saying, “it’s also clear to me that we need some new intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build the 21st century policies that reflect the Democratic Party’s values.”
The Vision Thing
I understand why modern liberals feel they need to come up with an “exciting new vision.” Their last one led to a massive increase in the size and power of the state, centralization of power in Washington DC, the Great Depression, and social welfare programs that lured millions into dependency and will be bankrupt in 20 years, leaving nearly 100 million people without retirement income.
Our vision says powerful government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem; that peace and prosperity require that government’s power be limited and decentralized; that markets work best when they are free, and people behave better when their rights are clearly defined and respected; and finally, that individuals, not governments, have rights and responsibilities and so they should be trusted to solve social and economic problems without the help or hindrance of government agencies and rules.
Our vision was cast aside and nearly given up for lost for most of the twentieth century. But it was kept alive by groups such as the Foundation for Economic Education and the Mont Pelerin Society, and in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan as President, our vision began to change public policy. The elaborate and failed machinery called forth by the modern liberal vision is slowly being dismantled by a new generation of elected officials intent on empowering individuals by taking power away from government.
Our Business Plan
Unlike Podesta, we’ve got a vision. We’ve also got a business plan:
Step 1: Recruit the best free-market thinkers and writers in the country to think and write for us.
Step 2: Edit and rewrite their work so that it is comprehensible and compelling to the average person as well as to elected officials.
Step 3: Publish the ideas and arguments of these thinkers in formats and publications that policymakers say they prefer and surveys say they actually read.
Step 4: Send those publications to every state and national elected official in the U.S., the leading thinkers and doers in the freedom movement, journalists and reporters, and to grassroots activists, so we can gradually build social movements that can elect people who share our vision or drive out of office those who do not.
Step 5: Repeat steps 1-4, constantly seeking better writers and better ideas, improving our publications, and growing the social movements by giving activists outreach tools to use to recruit their parents, neighbors, friends, and coworkers.
It’s Working
We’ve planned our work, and now we’re working our plan. In a typical month The Heartland Institute distributes nearly 100,000 copies of its publications. Nearly 400 elected officials now serve on our advisory board. In the last three months we distributed more than 40,000 copies of our latest book, Let’s Put Parents Back in Charge! and expect to distribute another 20,000 copies before the end of the year.
According to a national telephone survey, 86 percent of state legislators know who we are and 60 percent consider us a valuable resource.
Our efforts, and those of others, are producing results. School choice is breaking through, with Colorado passing statewide vouchers earlier this year and Washington DC likely to adopt vouchers before the end of the year. Taxpayers from California and Oregon to Alabama rejected tax increases this year and made politicians who support them pay a high price.
Consumer-directed health care took off in 2003, replacing one-size-fits-all employer- and government-provided health insurance for millions of people. It’s revolutionizing an industry that accounts for 13 percent of the country’s GDP. Radical environmentalists are finally being challenged in the national debate over environmental protection, and market-based, private-property-based policies are getting a fair hearing. We may look back on this year as a genuine turning point in the worldwide debates over global warming and sustainable development.
Together We Can Win
As the old Jerry Reed country song goes, “we have a long way to go and a short time to get there” … but we’re moving in the right direction. Thanks to the people who support Heartland and think tanks like us, we’re going to win.
We have to win. There’s no going back. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1821, “The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume those engines and all who work for them.”
Jefferson was not wrong, but there’s nothing automatic about the victory of freedom over tyranny. We need to fight this battle every day. I’m very proud to stand next to you in this fight for human rights, economic opportunity, and justice.
