Capitalism powers the American Dream
Top Democrats currently promote an economic agenda that will do for America what that iceberg did for the Titanic.
Perhaps you’ve heard them: the “system” that creates billionaires is immoral; ratchet the top income tax rate into the stratosphere, with additional or higher taxes on “wealth,” corporations, or estates; Medicare for all; repeal President Donald Trump’s tax cuts; vilify, regulate and investigate Big Business; adopt the laughable Green New Deal, whose bad ideas include paying people “unwilling” to work; government guarantees for your “right” to a job, a home, health care; excuse college loan debt. And on and on.
Such zany, costly notions come packaged with incessant talk that capitalism doesn’t work, that the rich don’t pay their “fair share,” that you are not responsible for your lot in life.
This class warfare and excuse manufacturing is as disgusting as it is radical. But to their credit, at least the Democrats are open about it.
This week, conservative columnist and podcaster Ben Shapiro hosted personal finance guru Dave Ramsey on his show. After listening, my appreciation for Ramsey was renewed because what resonated more than his old-school teachings about handling one’s dough is what he said about America. It’s a lesson we all need right now.
Ramsey fired back at the liberals’ bum rush to institute an economy that would make Fidel Castro blush.
Ramsey recounted how he, as beer-swilling, hell-raisin’ Tennessee hillbilly, became a millionaire by 26, then spent himself into bankruptcy, and remade his life and his fortune.
In rebuilding, he told Shapiro, he went from starting on “a card table in our living room” to a company with 806 employees and $200 million in annual revenue — and “we never borrowed a dime.”
As an aside, Ramsey’s syndicated radio program boasts the third-largest audience on legacy radio behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, according to Talkers magazine, a trade publication.
Ramsey said he rebounded financially by delving into the Bible to learn what it said about money. “If you just read Proverbs over and over again,” he said, “you’ll have a master’s degree in finance.”
Ramsey told Shapiro that the keys to building wealth are simple: good character, hard work, thrift, delayed gratification, planning, and if you go to college, studying something that will make you marketable, rather than “left-handed puppetry” or “German polka history.”
The formula also follows the “success order”: finish high school before you have a baby or get married, and get married before you have children. “This is the proper way to live your life,” Ramsey said.
Ramsey noted we’ve lost sight of all of this tried-and-true wisdom — as we have the power of capitalism, of being a self-starter and of owning up for your own circumstances.
“The biggest problems we’ve got are not structural, and they’re not systemic. The biggest problems are belief breakdowns, where people believe the wrong things and ... then make bad decisions,” Ramsey said.
“If you start to believe someone else is gonna fix your life, whoever it is — your employer, your mommy, the president, the Congress — you’re screwed,” he added.
“If I plant nothing, I can’t gripe about the farmer who planted corn, and was out there toiling to kill the weeds and in the hot sun — meanwhile I’m standing over here watching the guy and I go, ‘It’s not fair that he’s got some corn.’”
Ramsey, a self-described “capitalist pig,” noted that “capitalism is what happens if you leave people alone.”
“They will go and function in their own best interest. Some of them will do it crooked, some of them will do it with morals, some of them will do sanctified capitalism, and some of them will do it wrong, and you wish you hadn’t let them run loose,” he said.
“But I see so much more good happen in the marketplace when we let people do their own thing.”
At one point Ramsey observed, “The American dream is alive and well.”
Ramsey is right in that our system isn’t always pretty or free of bad actors. Yet all it takes to turn that dream into a nightmare is embracing the Democrats’ agenda of envy, defeatism and nanny-state micromanagement, and their misguided belief that we will somehow prosper if we bottle up the spirit that built America into the greatest economic power the world has ever seen. Bill Thompson (bill.thompson@ theledger.com) is the editorial page editor of The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla.