I Love My Country

I love my country, America. There has been nothing like it in the history of the world. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts about our revolution and the founders of our republic. It’s easy to be sarcastic or critical of their faults but these men, intellectuals, farmers, lawyers, and businessmen, founded the United States on ideals. Those ideals, borne of the Enlightenment, gave us liberty and the sovereignty of individuals above government which has enabled us to pursue our dreams and prosper. 

We take our founders for granted today. We forget how brave they were. When they signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a declaration of war against the British Empire, they challenged the most powerful military on the planet. As British citizens this was treason which put their lives on the line. Had they lost the bitter seven-year war they would have been hanged, their homes burned, and their property confiscated. Their families would have been harshly treated, pariahs for the rest of their lives.

But they won. They gave us the world’s best Constitution which granted us the right to life, liberty, private property, limited government, and the rule of just laws. Thanks to that formula Americans became the luckiest and most prosperous people on the planet. 

Yes, slavery existed and it was evil, but this country would not have existed had not that fateful compromise with the slavery states been made at the founding. We did eventually abolish slavery at the cost of six or seven hundred thousand lives. 

Contra the misinformation provided by the 1619 Project, America was not founded on evil unless you can say the rest of the world was pure. The great free market economist, Thomas Sowell, a black intellectual at the Hoover Institute wrote, “Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18^th century.” America and Britain were one of the few societies to question the morality of slavery at that time. 

Why am I saying all this? One is because we just had an election and a peaceful transfer of power. Readers may recall that I was not a fan of either presidential candidate and I spoke rather loudly about it. Perhaps there would have been more chaos had Trump lost, but we’ll never know that.

Despite what Trump’s detractors say about his authoritarian tendencies, he won’t be a dictator. The beautiful thing about America is that we have strong democratic institutions which protect us from autocrats. I have faith in those institutions because they have stood for 250 years and have protected us from authoritarians who would deprive us of our liberties. An attempt by anyone to seize power would be thwarted by the rule of law, one of the strongest and most enduring of American institutions. Those who doubt this have been watching too many apocalyptic movies.

In the last 100 years the closest we came to authoritarian rule was the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His attempt to take over the economy during the Great Depression and run it from Washington, D.C. would have been, in essence, an economic coup. Instead of free markets and free choice, the economy would have been run by intellectual bureaucrats setting economic goals similar to what was happening in the USSR, a system admired by many of his “Brain Trusters.” Fortunately FDR was thwarted by the Supreme Court which struck down his 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act. His threats to pack the Court lead to portions of the Act being approved piecemeal which led to further economic stagnation. I understand that many people believe FDR saved America during the Great Depression, but the data and policies do not support that belief. The reality was that it was caused and prolonged by the policies of Presidents Hoover and FDR which interfered with free market forces that correct economic busts.

Regardless of the setbacks caused by the New Deal, America survived the depression, won WW2, and by the late 1940s as most economic controls were lifted the economy took off. There have been 12 recessions since then and despite those blips, the economy has continued to grow, even accounting for the effects of inflation. 

Despite all of these challenges to our freedoms and way of life, we have not only endured but we have thrived. That tells me that the institutions created by the Founders are strong and have preserved the basic freedoms which we Americans uniquely enjoy.

We still have a lot to do. No society is perfect, least of all ours. As strong as we are, we can’t take our individual and economic freedoms for granted. Our job as citizens of our country is to fight to keep our liberties. Despite whatever you think might happen under Mr. Trump, we will endure.