To Regulate or De-Regulate

Michael Novak has a post on The Catholic Thing that I think should be read.

It seems to me that the masses are not doing their homework on the issue of Regulation (which is what the Dems are pushing) and De-Regulation (which the Republicans ...well seem to be backing away from).

Everyone it seem, is looking for the handout and nobody wants to take responsibility for their own actions.

A nation of victims

... is this the new American way?

A Historical Change In Guidance Systems

Some social democrats and socialists, especially in Western Europe, view the current financial crisis in America with a certain gladness. They think this may discredit “democratic capitalism,” and confirm the superiority of social democracy.

This stance returns our public conversation to the questions of the 1972 electoral campaign, during which a significant number of left-wing American thinkers and activists began to rebel against statist institutions, habits, and ways of looking at things propounded by the New Left, and the many promoters of the large omnivorous state.

Looking at the state of social welfare in the United States at that time, these liberals (social democrats) were “mugged by reality.” They saw that social democratic programs did not work. Since they had begun to find socialism in all its forms unsatisfactory (and self-destructive), they sought a better guidance system. They found it in the American tradition of limited government, personal initiative, and economic inventiveness. They wanted to trim government by cutting both taxes and expenditures. They wanted to preserve the welfare state, by limiting its functions, and restoring responsibility to individuals and families. Enemies called this movement “neo-conservative.” It was actually neo-progressive. It gave primacy to the initiative, creativity, individual moral maturity, and to Aristotle’s conception of virtue. Without recognizing it, they adopted something like the Thomistic evaluation of the human person as the most noble and beautiful of God’s creatures. In their eyes, the common good meant nurturing citizens in virtue and happiness.

By 1980, many in this young movement had begun to coalesce around presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who believed that a just government had to be a great deal more limited than the government he would inherit, and that its budget needed to be greatly restrained. Mostly, he believed that the most dynamic propellants of a modern economy are the inventions and risk-taking of imaginative entrepreneurs.

Reagan recognized that more than 80 percent of new jobs in this country are created by businesses that employ twenty-five persons or fewer – and that the crucial incentives that lure entrepreneurs from the sidelines to the creative arena are marginal tax rates—which he cut from 70 to 28 percent. By also dropping the tax rates on capital gains (assets) to 30 percent, Reagan offered entrepreneurs a lure that they could not resist.
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