The Vital Importance of Limited Government, Religious Influence, and Economic Freedom
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. –Emerson
When J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physics professor at Berkeley, was approached by General Leslie R. Groves to head the Manhattan Project there was the “snag” of Oppenheimer’s left-wing background, which, in the words of General Groves, “included much that was not to our liking by any means.” The general wanted Oppenheimer anyway, because none of the other men suggested for the position appeared to be his equal. “He’s a genius,” declared Groves.
For his part, Oppenheimer thought himself “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.” At thirty-eight years of age in 1942 when he accepted the assignment, he listed three reasons on how he had changed in recent years from one who “had no understanding of the relations of man to his society.”
First, “I had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany.”
Second, says Oppenheimer, “I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. And through them I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”
Third, a few years prior to 1942, as he began to move among what he called “leftwing friends,” he wrote, “I liked the new sense of companionship, and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country.” However, after reading Engels and Feuerbach and all of Marx and finding their dialectics less rigorous than his taste, Oppenheimer declared, “I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me.”
Appealing to all members of academia, I would like to ask you to consider how deeply political and economic events are affecting the lives of your students. In hundreds of thousands of cases, year after year, young people are leaving our institutions of higher learning saddled not only with debt but unable to find suitable employment in an economy that has been reduced in many respects to a manifestation of leftwing politics. To address this very basic and systemic problem, your students need each of you–like Oppenheimer’s students needed him–to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community by promoting an economic environment that allows them to fulfill their potential and actualize their dreams.
How can this be done? Sadly, with leftwing politics so ingrained within our society, rather than moving into an economy built on meritocracy and free-market values, the talents and gifts of hundreds of thousands of students are being denied expression. With an emphasis on undermining the values of Western civilization, as well as a full-throated endorsement of a green agenda–which, in turn, leads to censorship, the curtailment of free expression, and mob rule–powerful interests are scuttling human potential by promoting a limited kind of diversity. This is no surprise, for as the data demonstrates, at many institutions of higher learning, those with the highest levels of education (including administrators and educators) are the first to dismiss those with conflicting points of view. In one of the great paradoxes of our time, many of those who prize academic freedom for themselves above all else are denying the very essence of academic freedom to those they teach. This is not the education standard our young people have been promised. The resulting impoverishment of intellect is a great loss to them and a tragic loss for our country.
There needs to be a major change in how we approach education. Instead of the politics of coercion, which are grounded in sensitivity, diversity, multiculturalism, and environmentalism (as defined by liberals), we need classrooms where traditional and theoretical ideas can find expression. We need laboratories where students can come to grips with how best to unleash their talents and potential in pursuit of their highest aspirations. Unfortunately, however, to the collective detriment of all Americans, an iron curtain of censorship has descended upon many of our institutions of higher learning. Rather than promoting academic freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas many of our most prestigious centers of higher learning are promoting diversity in everything but thought.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground. –Thomas Jefferson
That which the academic left undermines and opposes through censorship can be reduced to three categories: limited government, religious influence, and economic freedom. Institutional opposition to these foundational elements is one of the great mysteries of a free society, especially in light of the conclusion reached by Dr. Oppenheimer (the UC Berkeley creator of the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known) that Communist dogma or theory never made sense to him.
It is imperative that today’s young people are taught and understand that limited government, religious influence, and economic freedom are the pathway to the fulfilling of their potential and the betterment of society. No centralized government, no matter how big or well-intentioned, can effectively and efficiently control society in a beneficial way. On the contrary, big governments are inherently inefficient and harmful because in their promotion of dependency they rob citizens of their initiative and self-respect. As declared by President Franklin Roosevelt, “Continued dependence on government support induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” Evident in our time, big government corrupts the political process and eventually kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.
The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists. –William Jennings Bryan
During the past several years, I have had many rewarding experiences driving people from the Salt Lake Airport to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival or their ski vacations. The 45-minute drive is always interesting as I get to know people from all around the world. Two winters ago, as I drove two first-year college students from Austin, one of them proudly announced that she was a philosophy major who does not believe in God anymore. When I asked her how her parents felt about her atheism she said, “My dad is very sad.”
On a subsequent occasion I was driving a family of four. A daughter, who was attending Notre Dame, happened to be a philosophy major as well. When I asked her if her teachers had destroyed her faith, her mother looked up and said, “I want to hear the answer to this!” The twenty-six-year-old responded, “No. At Notre Dame they are very respectful of religious belief.”
Contrast her experience with what happened to one of my nieces at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, during her freshman year a few years ago. As related by her, she said that she was sitting in a required philosophy class with hundreds of other students when a tenured professor walked in and said, “If any of you believe in God that’s okay. But if you believe in God at the end of this semester it will be because you are a ‘blanking’ idiot!” My niece related that she stood up at that moment and walked out of the class.
Her stand reminds me of the experience of Robert P. George, a devout Catholic and tenured Princeton professor who has been called the most influential Christian conservative thinker” in the United States by Time magazine. As a 19-year-old, George was sitting in an introductory political philosophy class at Swarthmore College discussing “Gorgias,” in which Plato questions the motives for debate by asking if individuals argue in order to find and advance the truth or simply to boost their own social standing by winning the argument.
For George, contemplating those questions for the first time in college was like “having a bucket of ice water thrown in my face, and I woke up. I realized I should be asking a much more important question than about how to win debates. I should be asking the question, ‘What side am I on?’ For the first time in my life…I had to think my way to where I would stand, rather than just standing where I stood because it was what the ambient culture told me.”
With its foundation in faith, its action in works, and its aim of obedience to God in improvement of self and benevolence to others, religious influence is the foundation of society, the basis on which all true civil government rests, and from which power derives it authority, laws their efficacy, and both their sanction. In other words, religious influence is a universal good–a key ingredient in the flourishing of individuals and societies everywhere. Without its free expression, if shaken by contempt or loss of popular respect, the whole fabric of society cannot be stable or lasting.
Addressing why he is willing to fight for economic freedom, Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, Inc., recently wrote, “I want my legacy to be greater freedom, greater prosperity, and a better way of life for my family, our employees, and for all Americans. And I wish the same for every nation on earth.”
Those of us who cherish freedom and the opportunities freedom brings can relate to the desires of Charles Koch. We also want every living soul to experience the joy of potential fulfilled.
There are many reasons why the views of Oppenheimer, Roosevelt, George, and Koch have universal appeal. First, it is good to have feelings for the oppressed and to be willing to do something about it. Second, it is good to consider the state of young people who are facing a bleak economic outlook and be willing to participate more fully in the life of the community. Third, it is good to recognize the importance of limited government, religious influence, and economic freedom and then be willing to champion their value in the classroom, in the news, in political discourse, and from the pulpit.
A society that puts equality–in the sense of equality of outcome–ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. –Milton Friedman
As a further inducement to the abolition of social injustice, I suggest that preparing students for an economy built on limited government, religious influence, and economic freedom is our best way forward as a nation. As things now stand, the rate of return on capital, such as real estate, dividends, and other financial assets, is racing away from the rate of growth required to maintain a healthy economy. Stagnant pay, except among the super-rich, soaring health care and education costs, unemployment, high energy and transportation costs, and diminished expectations among young and old alike are becoming the norm. If these trends continue inequality will get worse as wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of a few. Moreover, the avenues of upward mobility that beckon us and define the American Dream will be closed off while retirement will become something to endure rather than to enjoy.
The solution to these problems is to create an economy with good paying jobs rather than an economy that punishes success via inflation, taxation, regulation, and redistribution of income. If academia could somehow reconcile their egalitarian views on poverty, income disparity, redistribution, and the environment with a realization of how deeply political and economic events are affecting the lives of their students and others, they might begin to see the harm in unrestrained government, of social engineering, of denigrating our Founders and our Constitution, of mocking religious influence, and of bashing capitalism.
To underscore the vital importance of economic freedom I turn to the wisdom of Charles Koch:
“Karl Marx famously said: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ The result of this approach is not equality, but rather a lowering of everyone’s standards to some minimal level.
“Some people worry about the disparity of wealth in a system of economic freedom. What they don’t realize is that the same disparity exists in the least-free countries. The difference is who is better off.
“Under economic freedom, it is the people who do the best job of producing products and services that make people’s lives better. On the other hand, in a system without economic freedom, the wealthiest are the tyrants who make people’s lives miserable. As a result of this, the income of the poorest in the least-free countries is one-tenth of what it is in the freest.”
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest… As for governing, I love to see honest men and honorable men at the helm, men who will not bend their politics to their purses, nor pursue measures by which they may profit, and then profit by their measures. –Thomas Jefferson
By doing their part to prepare their students to obtain good jobs in a market based economy, teachers and administrators will maintain the integrity upon which the system of higher education should be built. In so doing they will also help alleviate the problems of poverty, unemployment, and income disparity by placing their graduates firmly in the middle and upper-middle class income brackets. Beyond that, if they will realize and teach that an economy based upon limited government, religious influence, and economic freedom is in the best interest of not only their students but the entire human family, then, and only then, will they play their unique and pivotal role in helping to turn around a desperately misguided ship of state.