In the three years since I began keeping this blog I have laid out my opinion on a number of issues, ranted and raved about this, that, and the other, and contributed for my small handful of readers my thoughts whether helpful or not. What I have not done is articulated my own positions and the philosophy that underlies them. I think it is important that I do so now.
My political views are underpinned by my social and philosophical views, which I think is important. Too many politicians, it seems to me, cannot articulate why they believe what they believe. Democrats and Republicans alike, I find, are more prone to spouting off talking points, but when pushed can never seem to explain the foundation upon which their view are built. They simply believe things.
So here is what I believe and why I believe it. I believe that people are born as more or less tabula rasa. Yes, our DNA plays an important role in who we will become, but our environment is just as important. If I grow up on a farm, I'm likely to be outdoorsy, perhaps inclined to agriculture. If I grow up surrounded by guns, drugs, and other vices then I'm more likely to find those things appealing. And if I grow up in a stable home with access to high quality education then I am more likely to value education and become a self-motivated and independent person who can support himself (and hopefully a family) when I get older.
My personal belief is that people are likely to identify more with the environment in which they grew up than adhere to different norms when they get older. At some point people must take responsibility for and be held accountable for their own lives, but if do not invest in them at an early age then we bear some responsibility for negative outcomes. We may find it easy to blame adults for being lazy, and admonishing them for not working harder to find a job or better themselves, but we cannot fairly blame a six year old. We can, however, invest in a six year old knowing that our investment is more likely to make that person a responsible adult.
Let's paint this in less theoretical and more concrete terms. When we talk about outcomes of different groups of people in the United States, we talk about the exceptions, not the rules. Barack Obama, for example, is an exception. He grew up as a poor black kid and became president of the United States. Marco Rubio, too, is an exception. As a first generation American born to immigrant parents, he was elected to the US Senate. We only talk about poor or minority Americans when they have beaten the odds. How many kids can you name on the South Side of Chicago?
Similarly, when we talk about white or wealthy Americans, we are often talking about people who have beaten the odds, but in the wrong ways. People who have squandered their advantage. Lindsay Lohan shouldn't be a drug-addict. She has money and an education. She beat the odds to fail. The rich kid who squanders his family fortune isn't the norm, he is the exception. No one talks about me because as a middle class white guy with a good education, I was expected to end up exactly where I am - "successful," that is having a job I like and supporting myself. Had I grown up a poor black male and ended up selling drugs or engaging in gang violence it is very likely no one would be talking about me, because the way our system works, that's where I would be most likely to have ended up. In other words, we laud or deplore the exceptions to the rules without ever questioning the rules themselves.
Thus Mitt Romney ends up condemning 47% of the country, many, if not most of whom never had a real chance to turn out much differently. Yes, those adults do need to be held accountable, but again, I maintain that the odds are stacked against them because of their childhood environment.
So the question to me becomes how to we go about fixing that environment and imbuing people with a sense of personal responsibility? I think this can and should be done. I do not think society realistically can or should hold someone's hand throughout life. Personal accountability is supremely important, but again, people are not born with that notion, they learn it. How?
Many of the attempts our nation has made to fix poverty and change life outcomes have been failures because they have not addressed this question. I cannot make someone rich by giving them welfare checks and food stamps. In fact these programs keep people at subsistence levels of living rather than helping them out of poverty. I don't figure Ronald Reagan knew very much at all about the size of welfare checks when he famously spoke of "Cadillac Queens." I also can't force people to be better parents; I can't make them stop using drugs; I can't really make people do anything. After all I believe in personal responsibility. So what can I do?
I can invest in people at an early age. I believe society can proactively provide an education and skills making retroactive and ineffective investments more uncommon. I don't propose to eliminate welfare, I propose to make it less important by giving people the means to provide for themselves then stepping back and letting them do so.
I firmly believe that when given an education and opportunities, people will grow into self-aware, self-motivated, and overall good human beings. Again, we see this is the case when people are afforded these opportunities. Why are middle class white people so often not in the news? Because the majority of us were given opportunities and took advantage of them. My "success" was preordained to some degree. I would have had to screw up badly to not end up where I am today.
So in order to create a more equitable and stable society, we must invest in education and opportunities. If we give children education, exposure, and opportunity during their formative years I believe they will internalize it and grow into responsible adults. This happened to me and almost everyone I knew growing up as a child, and I believe it can and will happen to almost everyone who is lucky enough to have the same opportunities I had.
Those opportunities are something society can and should provide. If we create equal opportunity through education, we will arrive at more equal - though not entirely equal - outcomes. We can do all this without babysitting people for their entire lives, and we can do it while still believing that people must take accountability for their own livelihoods once they have received our collective investment. It is possible to believe in the power of public investment and be libertarian; these ideas are not mutually exclusive.
So I would describe myself as a leftward leaning libertarian, someone who believes in the power of public education and investment, but who believes people, after receiving this investment, can and should be accountable for their own lives and livelihoods. I firmly believe that by making such an investment in children through education we will create a more equitable and stable society and that we will alleviate the need for many of the safety net programs on which too many of our fellow citizens currently rely. My goal for something like food stamps or welfare is to give a larger lump sum than is currently being received to a vastly smaller group of individuals, empowering many to provide for themselves while giving those who legitimately cannot an outcome better than subsistence living.
This is my vision for America: a prosperous and stable country in which people are still incentivized to work hard, but have been granted the skills and education necessary to turn their hard work into tangible rewards - better lives for them and their children. A nation in which we can shrink our government and make it more efficient because we have eliminated the NEED for many types of government programs, not just the programs themselves. Individual freedom therefore is connected with smaller government, but society as represented by the government has the responsibility to invest in individuals in order to help them become self-sufficient.
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