No Apology: The Case For American Greatness
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Unions have an important role to play. They must defend the interests of their members. But the political power of organized labor has gone beyond the bounds of responsible measurement. The costs to the country are large. Union pension obligations will bankrupt states and cities. The demands of teachers’ unions block essential education reforms. And the sway of private sector unions causes political leaders to sacrifice the interests of the nation for the interests of the few, as with the president’s decision to restrict foreign tires and to deny Colombia favored trade status.
Our current campaign finance laws let politicians off the hook. In the past, campaigns themselves received and spent the lion’s share of the contributions made on their behalf. But under campaign finance reform, contributors are limited to 2,400 to an individual campaign, while they are permitted to donate unlimited amounts to so-called independent expenditure committees. What this means is that the big money now isn’t controlled by an individual campaign or candidate, but rather by an independent group. Ugly attack ads can readily be launched by the independent committee and the candidate can wash his hands of any responsibility. Campaign finance reform didn’t get money out of politics. It simply made that money less transparent and more difficult to trace, strengthened the hand of union bosses, and put financiers and ideologues like George Soros in the driver’s seat of many contests.
I wish there were a good, workable way to utterly remove the influence of money from politics. Instead of the current laws on the books, I’d much rather let people contribute the full amount they choose to whomever they want and simply require those contributions to be posted on the Internet for everyone to see. No organization—unions included—should be allowed to assess its members or collect dues for political campaigns or causes. Period.
We need a renewed commitment to the First Amendment guarantee of political free speech. When I went to law school more than three decades ago, we didn’t discuss campaign finance law; it would have struck everyone as extremely improbable that the incumbents in Washington could write laws that would limit the ability of others to criticize the job they were doing or campaign to replace them. But that is what they have done. The Supreme Court should revisit this ill-advised course.
John Adams and his fellow Founders foresaw the fragility of democracies, and their fears were not unfounded. They had considered the universal experience of people who had ruled themselves throughout history. Today, the failure of some voters to become informed and involved is worrisome. So, too, is the rise of populism and the sway of campaign fund-raisers. Because office-holders are unlikely to vote for an end to the finance system that helps them get reelected, statutes, and regulations are unlikely to remedy the problems. The answer is to promote a strong and renewed commitment to the entirety of America’s culture of citizenship. In other words, the best way to encourage voter involvement and political statesmanship is to take steps to encourage hard work, risk-taking, love of country, sacrifice, integrity, and education—the foundation of American culture. The more our fellow citizens work, invest, sacrifice, and devote themselves to their families and their country, the more they will inherently care about who they elect to office and the laws and programs their representatives formulate while they are in office.
The best way to heal our politics is to strengthen our commitment to bedrock American values and to defend those values every day in the public square.
American Destiny
There is a current of opinion flowing among some of our elected leaders and popular icons that seeks to diminish the accomplishments and greatness of our collective culture. It is manifest in legislation that would reduce our work ethic by removing work requirements from welfare. It threatens risk-taking and opportunity with confiscatory taxes and income redistribution. Our love of family and our appreciation of its central role in society are worn down by the blithe acceptance of out-of-wedlock births. Expressions of patriotism and national pride take a backseat to incessant national fault-finding, and rather than recognize our national morality and goodness, some are inclined to apologize for America. I do not see this as a vast left-wing conspiracy, but I do see this as ominous and potentially ruinous if allowed to course unchecked. The danger of national demoralization and consequent decline is why we must mount a bold and effective plan to protect and strengthen our culture of citizenship—with no apology to those who deride our mission.
Despite the attack on our values, I am optimistic about America’s future because I’ve seen the heart of the American people. It’s easy to become pessimistic when we’re bombarded with media reports of the aberrant and the abhorrent, but we can learn more about our fellow citizens on the street than on the screen. My decades in business, charitable, religious, and public life—and my visits to every state but one—have convinced me that the American people are inherently good, and that America is destined to remain great.
In May 2006, I was invited by the Department of Defense to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit the members of the Massachusetts National Guard who were stationed there. I made the trip with Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri and Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana. We departed from Washington, D.C., refueled in Iceland, and landed in Kuwait, where men and women of the Massachusetts National Guard were stationed at an airbase, flying and maintaining a fleet of helicopters—one of which had been hit by small arms fire on a mission a few days before. The temperature on the tarmac was over 110 degrees—and we were assured that the hot summer weather was still to come.
We flew on to Baghdad aboard a Hercules C-130, wearing protective vests and sitting knee to knee with soldiers on their way to combat duty. The airplane’s crew kept a constant lookout for incoming missiles, making a trip that was just another day at the office for them but that was eye-opening for a first-time visitor to the theater like me. From Baghdad, we flew by helicopter to a number of different bases, and at every stop, each governor met with guard members from his state. We repeated similar stops in Afghanistan a few days later.
Along the way, I asked the Massachusetts guard members if any of them wanted me to call their spouse or family when I got home. I knew they could call or e-mail themselves, but I thought perhaps they might want me to report home that they looked fine and were faring well. I asked those who wanted me to place a call on their behalf to write their name and home number on a piece of paper; by the time we departed, I had collected sixty-three phone numbers. My plan was to make a few calls every day over the next couple of weeks.
I returned home on Memorial Day, which I had planned to spend with Ann and our kids and grandkids at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. But first I decided to make just a few of those calls. After I’d placed only two or three, a guardsman’s wife answered and said, Oh, Governor Romney, I thought it might be you calling. She explained that after I had contacted the first of the wives on my list, she had e-mailed her husband about it, and he in turn had e-mailed his buddies in Iraq and Afghanistan, telling them to let their wives know to expect my call. The dynamic of instant communication combined with extraordinary closeness of military families with deployed loved ones had kicked in.
So I realized that sixty-three spouses and families would be waiting, so I placed sixty-three calls to Massachusetts homes that Memorial Day.
I was deeply moved by what people said to me. Remember, May 2006 was a bleak time in the Iraq War. We were suffering a terrible number of casualties. The Iraqis appeared unwilling to come together as a nation. And the surge that would ultimately prove so successful had not yet been implemented. At home, many pundits and politicians alike had thrown in the towel. These people with whom I spoke weren’t likely to be hearing congratulations and words of thanks from their neighbors. And I presumed that almost all of them would ask me why their soldier couldn’t come home—now.
Yet in sixty-three calls, I did not hear a single complaint. Not one. And each time I expressed gratitude on behalf of our nation for the service and sacrifice of their family member an
d themselves, virtually everyone told me that it was an honor to be able to sacrifice for America and to serve the nation that is the hope of the earth. Many calls left me with tears in my eyes. It was, without question, the most memorable Memorial Day I have ever spent.
There is nobility in the hearts of Americans like these—and in all Americans. What makes this nation great is her people—not our government, not even our spacious skies and amber waves of grain. I suggest without apology that if we strengthen the American people, America will meet its destiny for greatness for centuries to come.
No Apology: The Case For American Greatness
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America the Beautiful
When John Adams doggedly worked his way through the grand capitals of Europe in pursuit of loans for our fledgling republic, he could not have imagined that in only a few generations, it would be America that would rescue Europe. In some ways, our nation’s ascent has been wholly improbable: our founding was based on a war nearly lost, a set of Articles of Confederation that failed, a Constitution that was barely ratified, and a second war with Great Britain that went badly. Less than a century later, we succumbed to a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The war claimed more than 600,000 lives.
But endure we did. And not merely endure but rise to a greatness and goodness never before seen in human history. Our beneficent geography and natural resources deserve a share of the credit, but it was the geography of the American heart that brought us to the heights to which we have risen.
In times of turmoil, anxiety often clouds the larger view. The current recession’s agonizing unemployment and its destruction of great amounts of our wealth and savings have blinded some to our great achievements and to our unquestioned ability to rise again to even greater heights of prosperity, leading the world to the same end. Our standard of living still exceeds that of almost every developed nation. Our individual ability to rise above humble beginnings and make what we want of our lives causes people around the globe to marvel. Our innovative spirit has again transformed the world’s largest economy, permitting America to excel in almost every emerging technology. All of these things can and will continue far into the future if we preserve the conditions that nurtured them in the first place.
More important than a clear view of the past is our vision for the future. Conspiring rivals gather economic and military might, hoping to surpass us as the world’s most powerful nation and to limit our ability to preserve prosperity and promote freedom. Even as other nations pursue their ambitions to narrow America’s lead, some voices both here and abroad welcome the potential for greater balance of international power. If they seek balance with the other liberal democracies like Japan, India, or the European Union, then I stand with them, for the rising strength of all free nations strengthens America. But with few exceptions, the gap in power between the United States and these other democracies is widening, not narrowing. Europe faces debt and entitlement liabilities far greater than our own. Its militaries have been decimated. And with a precipitous drop in population, they are confronted with a demographic night.
China’s economy will almost certainly grow larger than ours by the middle of this century. By that time, its military capabilities in the Asian Pacific may exceed all others nations in the region, but they must not exceed ours. Everything the Chinese leadership tells us now is meant to assuage our fears about their ambitions. Their leaders assure us of their desire for a partnership with us that will create world stability and peace. They remind us of our current economic and military lead. And they recount their dependence on our consumer market for their growing employment. Everything points to their intent to be a responsible, unaggressive world player—except their actions.
If those in the world who look forward to greater balance with the United States hope it will come from Russia or the jihadists, they will surely regret it if they get their wish. Russia’s paranoia, autocracy, and repression of civil liberties do not mix with liberty and democracy—it endeavors, in fact, to eliminate them. And the jihadists seek to kill us, to enslave us, or to consign us to a twenty-first-century Dark Ages. North Korea and Iran also rush to narrow our military lead. By devoting a massive share of their economic wealth toward the development of nuclear weaponry, they aspire to hold a nuclear knife to our throat.
Before any of us extols the approach of an era of decay of America’s relative power, as President Obama did at the United Nations in September 2009, we must consider what our strength has meant to the world, and what its decline would presage.
In 1975, only a quarter of all countries were electoral democracies in which their citizens were guaranteed civil liberties. Today, almost half the nations in the world are free. Billions of people have been lifted from poverty thanks to the defeat of totalitarianism, to the promulgation of the principles of freedom and free enterprise we pioneered, and to the growing access to free markets. In all these arenas, America’s leadership has been indispensable.
We are well advanced into an unformed era in which new and unfamiliar enemies are gathering forces, counseled the late congressman Henry Hyde, where a phalanx of aspiring competitors must inevitably constrain and focus our options. In a world where the ratios of strength narrow, the consequences of miscalculation will become progressively more debilitating. Yet, as we have seen, miscalculations abound: too much spending and debt; too little investment in our defense; too little support for our friends and allies; too much foreign oil; too large a burden of entitlements and health care; too easy an acceptance of failure in our homes and schools. The miscalculations persist, in part, because we don’t add them up and weigh their collective toll, and because there is passing political advantage in minimizing them or discounting them completely.
Forecasting America’s Strength
During the 1930s, economists began compiling a series of figures they hoped would predict the future direction of the American economy. Today, the Composite Index of Leading Indicators is composed of ten components, from weekly jobless claims to building permits to consumer sentiment. Particularly when several indicators move in the same direction as the overall index, it provides useful signals about the likely direction of the economy, according to the Conference Board’s 2004 report, Using Cyclical Indicators. However, the predictive value of the index can be trusted only for the very short term—a period of months or a couple of years at the most.
I believe that we could also identify useful signals that would inform us of conditions that are likely to exist over a much longer time horizon, from twenty-five to fifty years. Specifically, these markers would help us gauge the extent of America’s economic and military lead in the more distant future, thereby shedding light as well on the prospects for world peace, prosperity, and freedom. We might call it the Index of Leading Leading Indicators, and it would forecast America’s strength and thus the prospects of global progress. Such an index ought to include the following indicators, described below in the order in which I’ve presented them in this book:
1. The Prevalence of Freedom. What proportion of the world’s nations, population, and GDP are in countries that maintain electoral democracy and civil liberties? The global reach of freedom clearly has an impact on our nation’s security and safety, but it also affects our and the world’s economy: the more freedom, the more the opportunity for trade and productivity, and the more we and others prosper. Over the past fifty years, the number of free countries has more than doubled, but recently the trend has reversed. Freedom House reports that from 2007 to 2009, four times as many nations have experienced reductions in their freedoms as those countries that saw advances. 2. National Security Assessment. How do America’s military capabilities compare with those of other military-minded nations and with threat groups like the jihadists? Is accurately calculated U.S. defense spending at least twice that of either China or Russia? What is the extent of our nuclear vulnerability to North Korea, Iran, an
d other rogue nations or entities, and are we capable of keeping ourselves safe from their deep malevolence? How militarily capable are democracies like Japan, the countries of the European Union, India, and Canada? While America maintains a significant military lead, the Obama administration’s planned spending reductions—despite ever greater threats from abroad—suggest that we are becoming less secure. In fact, the retreat from missile defense by the president is sufficient reason to conclude that this indicator is falling. 3. Relative Productivity. What is America’s productivity relative to major economies like those of China, Japan, Korea, Germany, and France? Because our productivity is currently the highest among our rivals, our average income, standard of living, and GDP are also the highest. But political forces are at work that could sharply affect our productivity, including protectionism, expansion of union demands and power, the rising taxation of capital, and the growing disfavor of free enterprise. A 2009 Rasmussen poll found that 33 percent of Americans under thirty prefer socialism to capitalism. If our economic competitors continue to move to the right and we move to the left, our productivity advantage will decline. 4. Relative GDP and Growth Rate. Our economy is still the largest in the world; China’s population and growth rate, however, mean that it will pass us by the middle of this century. 5. Trade Share of the GDP. How large a share of our economy is represented by exports, and how much by imports? Which of the two is growing the fastest and how large is the trade gap between them? High levels of trade represent opportunity for American businesses and entrepreneurs, more plentiful jobs for American workers, and better value for consumers. 6. Relative Market Shares in Growing, Traded-Product Industries. Are American companies the leaders in the fastest-growing and emerging fields, particularly in products and services that are exported and traded around the world? And, are these companies gaining or losing market share relative to their international competitors? Sadly, American companies have lost their competitive advantage in a number of industries: aircraft, semiconductors, mobile phones, consumer electronics, copiers, cameras, musical instruments, marine products, shipbuilding, textiles—and the list goes on. Fortunately, we lead in some of the fastest-growing industries like biotech and pharmaceuticals, software, data storage, defense products, entertainment, and financial services. 7. Innovation Index. How many Ph.D.s currently graduate in math, science, and other growth-sector disciplines compared with our economic rivals? Once the leader, we now follow in this area. How many Ph.D. immigrants are we attracting to the United States each year? What is the extent of private and public investment in basic science and research? Here, too, we have pulled back. What is the level of taxation on innovation relative to other nations? Unfortunately, U.S. capital gains taxes are slated to rise. 8. National Debt and Liabilities. Our national debt is projected to grow by 9 trillion over the next decade—more in ten years than in the last two hundred years. According to USA Today, in 2008 alone, the federal government added 6.8 trillion to the total of our national liabilities, bringing the year-end figure to 63.8 trillion—almost five times as large as the national economy. This federal obligation represents 546,688 owed by each American household. Unless entitlements are reformed and the federal budget reined in, these obligations will continue to sharply expand, absolutely and as a percentage of the GDP. 9. Tax Bite. What is the level of federal, state, and local taxes as a percentage of the GDP? Historically, the federal burden has ranged between 18 percent and 20 percent of the GDP, but spending plans, entitlement growth, and resistance to U.S. borrowing levels may lead Washington to break through this level, creating an even greater tax burden with all its attendant repercussions.10. Health-care Funding Gap. We spend about 6 percent of the GDP more on health care than other developed countries: 7.4 percent more than the United Kingdom, 7.2 percent more than Japan, 5.3 percent more than Canada, 6.8 percent more than Italy, and 4.8 percent more than France—and that 6 percent gap alone represents an annual amount that is greater than the 3.8 percent of the GDP that we spend each year on national defense. Given that our health and mortality rates are comparable with these nations, this funding gap represents a very large burden on the economy, and the Obama administration’s plan to subsidize health insurance for millions more Americans will cause this figure to rise.11. Energy Burden. What percentage of total energy consumption and percentage of the GDP are our energy imports? Both figures have risen sharply over the last two decades12. Children Born Out of Wedlock. This is perhaps the most reliable predictor of the future education level of the population, as well as an indicator of future social ills. The number of children born out of wedlock continues to climb alarmingly.13. Relative Educational Attainment. What is the quality of the education that American students receive in comparison with those of other countries? What is the extent of the achievement gap for minorities? What proportion of our immigrants have attained high school, college, or advanced degrees?14. Citizen Engagement. What percentage of eligible voters actually vote? How many minutes or hours per day do people spend reading the news and informing themselves about important issues, as measured by Nielsen ratings, Internet hits, and newspaper and magazine circulation? What is the level of our citizens’ patriotism, respect for human life, work ethic, obedience to law, and willingness to sacrifice?.