The New Culture War

At the end of April, Arthur Brooks wrote a smash op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the real culture war taking place in America today. According to Brooks, the new president of the intellectual powerhouse American Enterprise Institute, the "new cultural schism" developing is not over abortion or gay marriage, but free enterprise.

Brooks points to the recent tea parties that occurred across America as evidence that this schism is beginning to widen, despite the early popularity of Barack Obama, who promised to patch all cultural cracks.

The tea parties, Brooks says, are based on an "ethical populism" and led by respectable homeowners who didn't abandon their mortgages, small business owners wary of corporate welfare, and responsible bankers not in need of government bailouts. These people played by the rules, but are now financially on the hook to reward irresponsible homebuyers, greedy executives, and corrupt politicians. In a politically-correct world so concerned with "fairness," that robbing the good to prop up the bad seems at all fair is perhaps the worst irony.

For the moment, at least verbal support for free enterprise remains strong. Yet social democrats are working hard, as Brooks notes, to wage a "culture war of attrition using economic tools." By demonizing the wealthy, the businessmen, the entrepreneurs-the very people who create wealth for the rest of society to enjoy-social democrats have found an effective way to drive support for a centrally-planned, wealth-sapping economy.

This, as Brooks correctly implies, is not just an assault on capitalism, but on freedom. And freedom is a moral issue. By punishing those who drive our economy, whether through excessive taxation of a small group or hyper-regulation of business and industry (which will hurt all of us), social democrats are seeking to destroy free enterprise. The freedom tied to free enterprise is a core American principle.

Entrepreneurs, disproportionately, are not in business to make money. Most enjoy the freedom to use their creativity and personal talents to create something that either will help people or that people want. There is nothing wrong with this, something with which most social democrats will agree. But good products normally bring in good money, and the government and anti-capitalists apparently have a big problem with this.

Why should you, a hard-working, creative individual, be able to enjoy the success of your labor? There are multitudes of people out their with less talent, more aversion to risk, less motivation, or a poorer work ethic who, according to social democrats, are resentful of you and your success and somehow victims of it. Never mind that once you are forced to do as government says, most entrepreneurs will take the jobs to more enterprise-friendly environments. Then how will the "victims" feel. If the social democrats can't empower the non-entrepreneurs, then they'll destroy any incentive to become one. That is the price of fairness, as defined by social democrats.

American enterprise and initiative have defined us as a nation. From what I see, things have worked out pretty well for our country because of this. We are phenomenally wealthy, we privately dole out massive amounts of money and aid to foreign and domestic causes, and our models and practices have been envied and copied across the globe. Now, the social democrats want to take away the option to be different, to stand apart from the world.

Please don't get me wrong. There are things that we as Americans should change. But destroying our freedom to use our talents to successfully engage in free enterprise-which has proven time and again to better the lives of everyone involved-is not something we should be toying with. Let's take a cue from the tea party crowd and tell the social democrat government to stop pilfering our pockets for pet projects.

We made the money. We were free to make it. We should be free to do with it as we wish. Some of us, to be sure, will make poor choices. But most of us, as we've seen throughout history, have big hearts and want to see others succeed as we did.

Most of us remain honest, moral people. We pride ourselves on our freedoms and our abilities. This government, like all governments, is either amoral or immoral. It can only exist by receiving our wealth or taking it. It doesn't create it, no matter what it says.

So why do we continually let them tell us how they're going to spend it?