Right now, I’m being accused of being a Democrat a lot of the time because many of the Democrats are beginning to side with me. I think what really happened is that the Democrats saw the pasting they got in this election and were smart enough to move to a more centrist position, which is where I am. The Republicans are still hanging out on the far right, unmoving. So I’m now being accused of being a Democratic governor, which is ridiculous. I’m not a Democratic governor. I’m independent!
I’m thrilled that so many people came out to vote in this election. That tells me that Minnesotans have faith in our ability to change the status quo. We had the highest voter turnout in an off-year election in eighteen years—61 percent! Now, 61 percent is good, but I bet we can do even better. Next election, I’m not going to settle for less than 70 percent.
So where are we going these next four years? Well, you know about the budget-surplus refund. That was the issue that made me run for governor in the first place—I couldn’t understand how it’s possible that we’ve had a $4 billion tax surplus in Minnesota, and yet my property taxes have kept going up by a steady $460 each year. I’m going to get that money returned to the people who paid it.
Education is my other big priority in the next four years. I truly believe that most of our social problems today can be tackled by better schooling and better parenting. Now as far as the parenting goes, I have to leave that up to the people—it’s not government’s job to interfere in how you raise your kids. But I can focus my attention on getting our public schools to do a better job of educating our young people. Mae Schunk and I have launched a plan to make sure that the money that was earmarked for classroom-size reduction is going to reach its intended target; rest assured, we will follow through.
Now that the budget’s in for the next two years, my next big project is to do away with the bicameral legislature system. There’s no need to have two bodies of legislature performing the exact same job. Minnesota has too many unnecessary layers of government. If we go to a unicameral legislature where everything is debated out in the open, we’ll not only cut expenses, we’ll make everyone more accountable. We’ll eliminate the backroom conference committees where all the vote trading and political protection and power brokering goes on. Making the legislature unicameral would be more cost-effective and keep everyone more honest. It’s worked for decades in Nebraska; we can make it work here.
I think the Democrats see themselves as government CEOs. They think it proves they’re doing their job if they can show that there’s been growth during their time in office. It’s assumed (there’s that word again) that any growth is good. But don’t forget how growth is spelled for you and me: T-A-X-E-S.
I know my opponents made a lot of noise about tax cuts, and they liked to point to me and say that I didn’t have a plan for cutting taxes. Now first of all, don’t forget that when these guys talk to you about a tax cut, they’re usually talking out of the other sides of their mouths about spending money. I figure a realistic goal for the time I’m in office is to keep taxation in check—if I can keep your taxes from going up, that in itself is a tax cut. I want the impact government has on people’s lives to be minimal. Government should, ideally, do its job as invisibly as possible. If I do my job right, people will hardly notice that the government’s been around for my four years.
So what will I do when my time as governor is over? I’ll tell you when I get there. The job I have right now is gravely important, and it’s so all-consuming that I have to concentrate on it exclusively; I don’t have time to think about the future. I have to leave the possibility open, too, that Minnesotans will want me to be their governor for a second term. If they do, I’ll give them another four years. I’m happy to serve eight years as governor, but I’ll never do a day over eight, because I believe in term limits.
But don’t look for me to make a run for the White House. I don’t want that. I see what happens to everybody who takes that office: They all go in so virile and young, and then in the course of four years they age twenty. I can get by being governor, but being president would be too much stress, too much responsibility—I’d be the most powerful person in the world! I don’t want that pressure. And I don’t want to do that to Terry. I won’t say absolutely not, but I wouldn’t put any money on there ever being a Jesse “The Prez” Ventura.
I don’t know if I’ll do more movie work once my time as governor is over. There are still more roles I’d like to pursue. An all-time fantasy of mine is to act in a movie with Robert De Niro. But I might not do that at all.
There’s a distinct possibility that once my time is up as governor, Jesse Ventura will disappear from the public eye forever. If I do two terms here, I’ll be fifty-five when it’s over. My governor’s pension will kick in. If I retire then, I’ll still have enough time and energy left to do a few things I’ve wanted to do all my life. My dad always used to say they had it backward: “They should let you retire when you’re young and you can do all the things you want to do and put you to work when you’re old, ’cause then it don’t matter.”
My dream of retirement is to sell everything I own, go to one of the Hawaiian Islands, buy a little cottage on the beach, and become the surf bum I pretended to be all those years. I’d spend my time surfing and marlin fishing. I think Terry would go for it as long as there was someplace where she could have a horse. I wouldn’t even own a watch: I’d know that when the sun comes up, it’s time to get out of bed; when the sun is overhead, it’s time to eat lunch; and when it goes down, it’s time to go to bed again. I’d grow my hair and beard out long so nobody would recognize me, then ride quietly off into the sunset.
It worked for Jim Morrison, didn’t it? Sometimes I hear rumors that make me think the Lizard King didn’t die, he just quietly, ingeniously slipped out of the public eye and is living on some tropical island even as we speak. That might be a poetic end to the public career of Jesse “The Body” Ventura.
But for now, I’m happy where I am. I took this on willingly, and I’ll accept whatever comes from it. Whatever it takes to get the job done, I’ll adapt. It can’t be any harder than wallowing in the mud flats at Coronado, and I got through that. Besides, the food’s a lot better here at the governor’s mansion than anything they ever served me at BUD/S: rainbow trout with bacon and onions on top; filet mignon smothered in mushrooms, onions, and cheese; brandied bananas and cream, which just happens to go perfectly with stogies. Terry calls the guys who cook for us at the mansion the Evil Chefs, because they’re always tempting us with incredible food. Just so you know, the Evil Chefs cook the meals, but I buy the groceries.
I’m willing to become a prisoner in my own home for a while because I have a vision for Minnesota’s future. I can see a Minnesota that’s even better than the one we have now, and I want that for our state. And I want to show the rest of the nation and the rest of the world what’s possible when good people take a stand. If I accomplish that over the next four years, it will be worth all the loss of freedom and the lack of privacy I’m putting up with now.
I’m happy. I enjoy what I’m doing. I’m up for the challenge. I enjoy getting up and going to work every day. I even get to have some fun. Let me tell you about one of my first official proclamations as governor: When I heard that the Rolling Stones were coming to Minneapolis to play at Target Center, I declared February 15 Rolling Stones Day. It’s completely official, on the books and everything, forever and ever amen. At the concert, I presented them with a gold-framed certificate full of lots of “whereases” and “therefores” and the seal of the State of Minnesota. The Stones loved it. And Minnesota will be observing Rolling Stones Day every February 15 even after I’m long gone. It’s good to be the king!
C H A P T E R 9
SELF-RELIANCE
I was in office hardly more than a month when I got booed and hissed by a bunch of college students for not spending more on education. I had just submitted the new budget. Do you know how much of the new spending in the bud
get went to education? Seventy percent! But that wasn’t enough for them. They were yelling that they had kids to support and that they were trying to advance themselves by going to college. I asked them, “Well, why did you have children before you were ready to get serious about being able to support them? You make a mistake, you do something in the wrong order, you voluntarily make children you’re not ready and able to support, and then you look to the government to pay for what you’ve done?”
Then somebody yelled, “But my husband ran off!”
I said, “Is that my fault? That you got involved with a jerk?” And they booed me!
Now, I’m not saying all young people are like this. In fact, that same day, other college kids who heard that whole exchange sent me notes apologizing for the ones that booed me. But it just goes to show you the attitude of entitlement that’s very prevalent in this country right now.
This is the kind of thinking you get when young people start doing grown-up activities before they have a grown-up level of maturity. That’s why I think socialism becomes appealing to some young people. They move out of that carefree period of their lives, they get a family and responsibilities, and then they start to get worried. Up until now, their parents have been taking care of them, and they don’t yet have a good sense of what it means to take care of themselves. So they start looking around for someone else who’s going to take care of them. That’s when they turn to the government. That’s one handy way you could define socialism: It’s federalized mommy and daddy.
College has always been the bastion of socialism. It’s the birthplace of new ideas, and that’s good. But it’s fun to get to be my age and have watched the college kids protest and demand more money; fifteen years later, after they’ve had jobs, they look at half their paychecks going to the government and my, how their ideas change! All of a sudden, they see these great social ideas in a different light. They’ve been footing the bill for a few years!
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we took more responsibility for teaching young folks the value of self-reliance, the thought of looking to the government to solve all their problems wouldn’t even cross their minds. A few generations ago, we were all raised that way: You stand on your own two feet; if you get yourself into trouble, you get yourself out of it. Somehow over the last few decades, that message has gone missing from what’s being passed down from one generation to the next. It’s a dangerous trend.
Believe me, our government as it is now is not something you want to rely on for your own personal security. It doesn’t have your best interests at heart. But even if it did—and it should—a democratic government should never be relegated to the role of full-time, cradle-to-grave caretaker. And that goes doubly so for anyone who is actually capable of taking care of themselves.
Over the past few decades, we’ve gotten into a bad habit of looking to the government to solve every personal and social crisis that comes along. People have really come to misunderstand government’s scope. There’s only so much it can do. For one thing, it’s a terrible social regulator. And morals and values aren’t things that legislation can even touch. You can’t legislate morality. It doesn’t work.
There are other ways to handle those things, better ways. One is called parenting. The other is called community. I was very fortunate: I was raised in a time and place where family and community were still very strong, when people fought to keep family and community together and keep them respectable. If you got out of line, you had an army of family, friends, and neighbors who you knew would be personally disappointed in you—people you cared about and respected. Have you ever felt what it’s like to know you’ve disappointed someone you cared about, someone who really knew you and knew you were capable of much better behavior? That’s a far more effective means of “regulation” than anything government can do to you. And it doesn’t even raise your taxes!
A democratic government’s only role is to help keep the playing field level for its citizens and to do for people what they truly cannot do for themselves. The government’s role is not to guarantee jobs or wages or to dole out money to anyone who asks for it. Once we start expecting government to take on those roles, we’re not going to like the consequences we have to live with. We can’t afford to think of government as a bottomless well of money. Remember, government doesn’t make a penny. The only money government has comes from working people: you and me. If we expect government to be ready at our beck and call, then we’d better be prepared to hand over more and more of our paychecks in taxes. Somebody’s got to pay for it all!
It’s not supposed to be that way. Not in this country. I find it totally unacceptable to pay almost half of my income to government. When that happens, rest assured, government has grown far beyond the job the Constitution created it to do.
It’s a vicious circle. The more we rely on government to solve our problems, the bigger and more expensive it becomes. The bigger and more expensive our government becomes, the more of our paychecks it takes and the more of our personal decisions it starts taking over from us. And the more money and decisionmaking power we lose, the more we lose our freedom. That’s why it’s so important for us to keep our government in check. Remember that old saying: “If they have to do it for you, they’re gonna do it to you.”
Freedom isn’t just something that’s handed to you. It can’t be. Simply by its nature, freedom requires independence. How free can you be, really, if you’re looking to someone else to provide for your needs? If someone’s providing for you, then they’re also making decisions for you. How free is that? True freedom means you stand on your own, sink or swim. You have to be able to make sound decisions and live with the consequences if you’re truly going to be free. In this country, more than any other in the world, we have a tremendous opportunity for freedom. But until we accept the responsibility that’s part and parcel of freedom, we’ll never truly have it. There is no real freedom without self-reliance.
Self-reliance is going to take time. People have become so accustomed to leaning on the government for help. Our dependence on government didn’t happen overnight; it’s not going to go away overnight. It’s probably going to take a generation or two.
There’s no magic for it. It’s just a matter of not looking to government to correct our mistakes. I have all the sympathy in the world for single parents. And I do think that the government should step in when one parent runs off and doesn’t support the kids. Absolutely. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. Certainly, accidents happen, and as a just society we should have a safety net for the victims of accidents. But I’m making a distinction here between these cases, which are legitimate need, and the attitude I’m seeing in many young people today. How fair is it, how mature is it, to sit there and blame the government for not supporting their rotten choices?
Now, it’s certainly government’s responsibility to go after these creeps and throw their asses in jail or garnish their wages if they don’t take responsibility for the kids they created. We should make life miserable for them. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say that government should be there to provide a safety net for the things you as an individual can’t do on your own.
But anything you can do on your own, even if it’s difficult, even if it requires a few sacrifices, you should tighten your belt and take responsibility for. You have no right to take other people’s money for something you can do on your own. It’s not fair to the rest of us.
Take going to college, for example. Nobody says you have to graduate in four years. You can go to college for however long it takes. And these days, bright high-school kids can take college courses for free. They can actually get college credit for stuff in high school. They can have half their credits done by the time they get to college! Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I think we’re a stronger nation if we’re made up of strong-willed, self-reliant people. Conversely, the more dependent and apathetic and weak-willed we become, the weaker a nation we’ll be. T
hat’s the trend I’m seeing, and it scares me.
Politicians have started catering to this “I’m entitled” mentality. Believe it or not, in this election, Skip Humphrey and Roger Moe were promising two years of free college to every young Minnesotan. Imagine what that would have done to the budget. Imagine what our taxes would have looked like if we’d have had to foot the bill for that. We’d be hamstringing ourselves—and our own kids—with enormously high taxes for a lifetime, just so that for two years some kids could coast through college on free tuition. How shortsighted is that? And who truly appreciates anything they don’t have to work for?
We’re fooling ourselves if we think that everybody who goes to college is committed to getting a four-year degree. I kept saying, “Skip, if you’re going to give them two years of free college, at least make it the last two, so that somewhere along the line they had to earn it!” My God, if Humphrey and Moe had had their way, we’d be reenacting the movie Animal House on a statewide scale. An associates degree would become nothing more than graduating from fourteenth grade.
Besides, you know they never would have gotten that plan through the legislature. It was a typically empty partisan promise. Humphrey and Moe really thought that young people were stupid enough to believe them. Fortunately, the young people saw right through that one. They voted for me.
I’m all for loving your fellow man, but we should expect him to love back. It’s selfish for someone to sit back and think they deserve the fruits of someone else’s labor. That’s what we’re doing any time we expect government to pay for something. Where do you think government gets its money? We should demand that people do whatever work they’re capable of—however humble it might be—and if necessary, we can make up the difference. I think if taxpayers saw that people were making an honest effort to contribute something, it would make it easier to help them the rest of the way. Welfare should be a safety net, not a lifestyle. But we’ve let it get to the point that if someone is on welfare and they get a job, they get penalized! It should be the other way around. That’s the mind-set we have to change.
I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Page 20
