Seven: Individual Incentives Matter
Because every American is a potential problem-solver, a lot of thought must go into aligning values and incentives. In changing our focus from the centralized bureaucracy to the free society that fosters the pioneers of the future, it is important to appreciate the incentives we’re establishing. Microeconomics (how individuals, small businesses, and markets behave) becomes more important than macroeconomics (how economies as a whole behave) in thinking through how to lead a healthy, prosperous, self-reliant, and free society.
Eight: Study Previous Breakouts
We can gain valuable insights by studying the previous periods of tremendous scientific, technological, and entrepreneurial achievement in American history. How did public officials and leading citizens navigate those momentous technological journeys? What mistakes did they make that we can avoid?
How Public Officials Can Be Breakout Champions
At every level of government, from the local school board to the U.S. Congress, public officials can take some important steps to encourage the next American breakout.
A public official, first of all, should be a teacher for the community. The words a legislator uses, the issues she focuses on, and the meetings she puts into her crowded schedule are powerful signals for others. Simply talking about the breakthroughs of the pioneers of the future and how prison guards of the past use government to halt progress encourages new ways of thinking. In their communication with their constituents, legislators should draw attention to the breakthroughs of pioneers in their district, across the United States, and around the world.
In particular, every legislator should develop an advisory committee of persons under the age of eighteen and should have at least one meeting per quarter in which any young person with ideas for the future or examples of pioneering activity could come and talk. Asking the young what they think can be done to develop new solutions and use new technology will break us far outside the restricted thinking and ingrained habits and institutions of the old order.
The town hall meetings that have become a popular means of communication with constituents are a good place to highlight the breakthroughs of the pioneers of the future and to shine a spotlight on the prison guards who would thwart them. A focus on breakthroughs gives a positive, solutions-oriented tone to the town hall meeting, in contrast with the hostility and conflict that sometimes characterize these encounters with the voters.
How Private Citizens Can Be Breakout Champions
You do not need to hold office to be a breakout champion. Every citizen can contribute.
In this age of social media, when Americans get so much of their news from family and friends, a simple first step to becoming a citizen breakout champion is sharing information on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. When sharing the story, make it vivid by telling how that breakthrough might make life in your community better. You will develop a circle of friends and associates who are passionate about breakout.
If you belong to a civic club or meeting group, invite pioneers of the future to speak. Educate your elected representatives about breakout and demand that they enact the changes we need.
When citizens go to a town hall meeting and ask questions about pioneering developments, they are accelerating the rate of change.
When citizens write letters to the editor identifying prison guards of the past and the cost of their opposition to a better future, they are accelerating the rate of progress.
When citizens write or call their elected officials, they are drawing their attention to new ideas and new developments or to roadblocks and limitations. Public awareness often precedes and leads official awareness.
When citizens draw attention to the breakdown of the big bureaucratic system and demand transparency to identify the waste and fraud in government, they are moving us toward a new breakout model of effective, affordable self-government.
Finally, when you are asked to support candidates or are looking for candidates to support, find out if they understand the principles of breakout. Do they appreciate pioneers of the future? Are they committed to breakout policies in education, energy, and health?
I will be offering workshops, short courses, and online working groups for citizens who want to get more deeply engaged. Go to www.BreakoutUniversity.com, and you can be engaged with others in identifying and helping pioneers of the future and identifying and defeating the prison guards of the past.
CONCLUSION
The past few years have been difficult for many Americans.
As the financial crisis of 2008 gave way to a prolonged economic slowdown, shock turned to fear and finally to hopelessness. Americans have wondered if higher unemployment, lower incomes, and diminished opportunity are here to stay. Some have accepted these changes as the “new normal.”
I hope this book has convinced you that an America with millions of people looking for work, failing schools, rationed and bureaucratic healthcare, dwindling and costly sources of energy, and broken-down government is not our inescapable future. There is a way out.
The future could be amazing. The innovations we are seeing in learning, health, energy, transportation, and even government have the potential to transform our lives. They promise to make America freer and more prosperous, with real opportunity for all. They promise to make life better and richer. They promise, in short, to achieve the American dream.
This is the choice America faces: the choice between breakout and breakdown.
Will we accept schools that do not educate our children and colleges that burden them with debt, or will we embrace the better alternatives?
Will we endure an inadequate healthcare system that gets more expensive every year, or will we speed the breakthroughs that can produce revolutionary cures and bring down costs?
Will we develop our country’s vast energy resources, or will we continue to pay unnecessarily high prices at great human cost?
Finally, will we accept an overbearing government, or will we renew the authority of the people over the bureaucratic state? This is really the fundamental question. The choice between breakout and breakdown is a political choice.
We have seen how the prison guards of the past use centralized bureaucracy, litigation, regulations, and red tape to delay or kill break through innovations in many fields. They squander America’s potential in order to protect their privileges and their old ideas, and they rely on our complacency not to do anything about it.
In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said, “It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.” Our country faces much the same decision today.
America needs a breakout movement, a new politics that is less about the Right versus the Left than about the future versus the past. It will require a new political language, new coalitions of pioneers and champions who understand the importance of breaking out, and new assertiveness in exposing the prison guards of the past.
The bureaucracies and systems of the old order cannot be reformed. They must be replaced. But if, in our effort to dismantle them, we focus only on what is wrong, we will never gain the momentum and public support needed for real change.
Fortunately, the very breakthroughs the prison guards are fighting to stop are the model for their replacement. Learning science and individualized education, regenerative and personalized medicine, and abundant energy and self-driving cars, among many other groundbreaking innovations, could solve so many of the problems Americans face today. I hope we will see them in my lifetime and yours. That will depend on your help.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Work on Breakout took several months, but the project really goes all the way back to my presidential campaign and even to my days in Congress. As a candidate for president, I was
struck by the difficulty of getting the political press to cover a topic as consequential as brain research or finding cures for Alzheimer’s. Although these issues mattered to millions of Americans, the press corps would not cover them, no matter how positive a response we got on the ground.
Following that campaign, I noticed that this response was part of a much larger pattern, and I was increasingly struck by the disconnect between the amazing innovations occurring outside of Washington—changes that seemed to have large implications for public policy—and the city’s preoccupation with the day-to-day trivia of politics.
At Gingrich Productions we were so impressed with the difference between Washington’s assumptions and a rapidly changing America that we undertook an extensive review of why Republicans were so surprised by the 2012 election.
The more we looked at the gap between the assumptions and the reality, the more we realized that something profound was happening among the American people. Realities outside Washington simply weren’t penetrating the Washington elites in either party, in the bureaucracy, or in the political news media.
What truly amazed us was the gap created by Americans’ creativity, excitement, enthusiasm, and problem solving. The country was pulling away from Washington, and the gap was getting bigger every year.
The executive summary of lessons learned from 2012 can be read at www.GingrichProductions.com/lessonslearned.
I want to acknowledge the support of Stephen Bonner, August Busch III, Frank Hanna Jr., Rick Jackson, Terry Kohler, Mario Kranjac, Mike Leven, Mike Murray, Christopher Ruddy, George and Breda Shelton, and Harold Simmons, without whom the months of research, exploration, and thought would have been impossible. Their help was the necessary bridge to conceptualizing what a breakout could look like.
The first sign of this breakout was the fracking revolution. I spent many hours discussing the revolution in American energy with my friend Scott Noble, the founder and CEO of Noble Royalties. While many in Washington continued to emphasize expensive alternative energy programs, Scott understood how deep and powerful the revolution in oil and gas production would be. Scott’s expertise and advice on this project has been extraordinarily helpful.
By chance I met separately with Sebastian Thrun and Bror Saxberg, each of whom told me about the amazing changes coming to education, which had scarcely entered the political discussion.
Sebastian also told me about his work at Stanford and Google on self-driving cars, which impressed me even further as I began to think about the transformative potential. Later, Robert Norton visited our office and made quite an impression with his stories of the barriers to automotive innovation.
I learned some years ago about Dr. Anthony Atala’s groundbreaking work in regenerative medicine and benefited enormously from his briefings on the latest science.
Finally, Alex Castellanos recommended Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s book Citizenville, which provided a compelling glimpse of the extraordinary opportunities for innovation in government.
Somewhere in the process of discovering all of this potential and contemplating the barriers to embracing it, we realized we had to explain the great opportunity in a book so people could see what was possible.
We are now hard at work developing online learning at www.BreakoutUniversity.com to continue collaborative learning with every citizen who wants breakout to become reality.
Ross Worthington has been an invaluable partner in developing Breakout. This book reflects his intelligence, talent, and many hours of hard work. Among other things Ross edits my e-newsletter, from which a few sections of this book have been adapted and which you can sign up to receive at www.GingrichProductions.com.
Ross and I were helped tremendously in this project by very smart and dedicated people.
Vince Haley and Joe DeSantis spent countless hours with us thinking through the Breakout concept at the whiteboard and developing the argument of the book. Joe made especially significant contributions to the energy chapter, and it was Vince who originally summarized our goal as a breakout from the emerging “new normal.” Everything became simpler after that. The project would have been impossible without them.
The support of the rest of our hardworking colleagues at Gingrich Productions was equally essential. Bess Kelly is at the center of everything that Callista and I do and is indispensable. Christina Maruna ably leads our online and social media efforts, while Woody Hales, John Hines, and Taylor Swindle round out a truly exceptional team.
Interns Allison Coyle, Jamie Greedan, Jack O’Donnell, and Angela Vargas (along with the aforementioned John Hines) contributed substantial research.
Terry Balderson, a research advisor who for years has sent me hundreds of news articles from around the world each day, contributed many pieces of information. Indeed, his support allows me to stay up to date on a constantly changing world. Jeremy Vaught, our all-around web guru, also contributed a number of good ideas and examples reflected in this book.
Tom Spence and Katharine Mancuso at Regnery did a terrific job editing and greatly improved the book. They put in many hours of hard work to meet a tight deadline. Marji Ross, president and publisher at Regnery, and Jeff Carneal, president of Eagle Publishing, both provided tremendous support for a project that was completely different from any other we’ve worked on together over the years. As always, I am grateful for their help.
Craig Shirley has tied a lot of my thinking firmly into the long evolution of conservatism starting with President Reagan, Congressman Jack Kemp, and myself in the 1970s. As Craig reminds us, this is in many ways the culmination of forty years of working to get beyond the failed policies and ideas that have been dominant. Peter Ferrara has been an amazingly creative thinker throughout this period and challenged us again and again to be bold.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus was very supportive in hosting Newt University at the 2012 Republican National Convention and then in including the Gingrich Productions team in his own “lessons learned” effort, later inviting me to discuss some of the ideas in Breakout at the RNC’s summer meeting. He has shown real commitment to figuring out how the party can “break out.” His chief of staff, Mike Shields, has facilitated much of our effort.
Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, too, reinforced the Breakout concept with great enthusiasm and displays remarkable vision and innovation as chair of the House Republican Conference. I also want to thank Congressmen Mike Burgess, Tim Griffin, Trent Franks, Tom Price, Greg Walden, and Pete Sessions for their encouragement. I want to thank Senator Marco Rubio for his future-oriented leadership as Speaker of the Florida House. In addition, Senators Rob Portman, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz have all encouraged the development of bold solutions. I also want to thank Governors Nathan Deal, Rick Perry, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, Bob McDonnell, and Scott Walker. Their encouragement and their example of innovative leadership and effectiveness kept me moving forward.
My old friend from my days in the House, former Congressman Bob Walker, is just as future-oriented and excited about science and technology as I am, and his advice on this project was very helpful, especially on the space chapter (a particular passion of his).
I am honored that my good friend Tony Dolan, who served as President Reagan’s chief speechwriter for eight years, agreed to write the foreword to this book and heroically met a tight deadline in doing so. His feedback and advice also contributed to the final product.
As always, Randy Evans and Stefan Passantino assisted us with their legal expertise. Randy has long been my general advisor on everything, and Stefan is an excellent counsel.
I am deeply grateful to my two daughters, Kathy Lubbers and Jackie Cushman. As president and CEO of Celebrity Leaders, Kathy does a terrific job of representing me. She has guided Callista and me through a combined twenty-seven books (including fifteen New York Times bestsellers) and seven documentary films. Jackie is a gifted writer, the author of two books, and an insightful columnist for
Townhall. She is also a wonderful mother to our two grandchildren, Maggie and Robert. Kathy and Jackie’s husbands, Paul Lubbers and Jimmy Cushman, are always supportive of our next adventure.
Finally, nothing I do would be possible without the love and support of my wife, Callista. Callista is a successful author herself, the creator of the New York Times bestselling children’s series featuring Ellis the Elephant, teaching four-to-eight-year-olds American history. In her latest book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Ellis discovers the American Revolution. In addition to her writing and her leadership as president of Gingrich Productions, Callista is a movie producer, cohost, narrator, and photographer. She also devotes hours each week to singing at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and to playing the French horn in the City of Fairfax Band. I am enormously proud of her accomplishments and grateful for her support in everything we do.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Julie Hoffer, “Battling for Life,” Cavalier Daily, April 27, 2001, http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2001/04/battling-for-life/.
2. Ibid.
3. Steven Ginsberg, “One Life Galvanizes Thousands: Out of Options, Virginia Woman Fights for Experimental Cancer Drugs,” Washington Post, May 7, 2001.
4. “Timelines: 1983; C225,” Life Sciences Foundation, accessed August 2013, http://www.lifesciencesfoundation.org/events-C225.html.
5. Reuters, “Rise and Fall of ImClone Systems,” Fox News, June 12, 2002, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,55120,00.html.
Chapter One
1. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation in America, 1815–48 (New York: Oxford University, 2007), 526.
Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate Page 23
