Are Americans the most gullible people in the world?
Any reasonable study of the facts would put us at or near the top of any list.
I’m going to throw out a few statements to consider and then look at them one by one.
“America is the freest nation on earth.”
“America is not a Christian nation.”
“America is a great force for peace on earth.”
“America’s free-market capitalist society provides the best opportunity for people to succeed.”
Let’s begin with the first statement.
“America is the freest nation on earth.”
Let’s start with a qualifier.
“… if you’re white.”
Or perhaps.
“… if you’re part of the mainstream society.”
Then you have to ask how to define freedom.
Too many people — many of them on the right side of the spectrum — define it first and foremost at not being told what they can or cannot do by the government.
Don’t make me wear a mask or get vaccinated, Don’t tell me I can’t buy whatever weapons I want to own. Don’t tell me I have to respect gay people … or black people … or women.
Don’t tell me I have to do business with those people.
But that’s not real freedom, and that’s not where we fall short in this country.
Economic freedom is where we really come up short, but we’ll get to that later.
One of the things often cited as to how Americans are truly free is that we are free to travel anywhere we want and not have to show our papers. Theoretically, at least, we are free to decide we don’t like living where we do and move anywhere we want.
This is actually a very important right, and it’s one that often turns out to be phony.
If you’re on the road just for the sake of traveling, you can run afoul of vagrancy laws in many places. Especially in hard times, people aren’t free to go wherever they want.
California actually set up checkpoints at the border during the Great Depression to keep other Americans out.
It wasn’t just California either.
And these were hard-working white people, so-called Good Americans.
Let’s move on to the second statement.
“America is not a Christian nation.”
Actually, the point here is to explain that America isn’t really a Christian nation, as conservative Christians claim.
It isn’t.
It’s a puritan nation.
A Christian nation would follow the teachings of Christ. Things like following the Golden Rule, turning the other cheek and taking care of the poor and infirm. Does that sound like the way we live in this country.
Instead, we claim that if someone isn’t successful, they didn’t work hard enough or weren’t moral enough.
Why is prostitution legal and regulated in numerous other countries but here is legal only in Nevada?
People on both extremes object here. On the left we hear that prostitution exploits women and on the right we hear talk about sinful extramarital sex. Both sides are puritans in their own way.
Why do we have a drug war that has only benefitted criminals and has increased drug use?
No one opposes legalization and regulation of currently illegal drugs than organized crime. If drugs become legal. In European countries that have legalized drugs, prices have cratered and addition rates actually have declined.
But our puritans tell us taking drugs is bad bad bad. Eeeeee-vil.
I don’t want to claim those opposed to abortion are puritans. That one is a life and death issue to many people. But abortions could be reduced tremendously with advances in sex education, birth control and different ways of making it easier for women who get pregnant to have their babies without trashing their lives.
But our puritans say that will never work because women should not be having sex if they don’t want to have babies.
America a Christian nation? No, not really.
On to the third statement.
“America is a great force for peace in the world.”
My response there is maybe Ernest Hemingway’s greatest line, the last one of “The Sun Also Rises.”
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
To be fair, we have had our moments. Maybe the greatest were Lend-Lease before we got into World War II and the Marshall Plan in the years after.
But far too often, particularly in our own hemisphere, our military has been used to protect the profits of American businesses in foreign countries.
Marine General Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, explained it best when he said anytime he had been sent outside the U.S., he was serving as an enforcer for American business.
President Reagan said America doesn’t shoot first, but that was really only the case when it came to major wars. There are dozens and dozens of instances of the U.S. sending troops into Latin American countries to, yes, enforce the rights of American businesses.
Then of course there was Grenada.
And any thought that we didn’t shoot first ended in 2003 when President George W. Bush took us into a war with Iraq under false pretenses.
The fourth and final statement might be the most important of all.
“America’s free-market capitalist society provides the best opportunity for people to succeed.”
As we approach the 250th anniversary of our country in three years, we have essentially had only two types of economy in this country — free-market capitalism and government-regulated capitalism.
It is only under the second of the two that average people — what we call the middle class — grow and prosper economically. And basically that has been our predominant system only from the end of World War II into the early 1980s.
Decades of reduced regulation and at least three massive tax cuts for the rich have given us the widest gap between the rich and the rest of the country.
And here’s where we really have far less freedom than other free countries. Most Western European countries have national health services that make sure all their citizens have medical care and hospitalization. Here private insurance companies in business to make a profit provide the services.
Most people who have insurance get it as a fringe benefit from their employer, which makes people less free to change jobs and risk losing their insurance.
Most Western European countries guarantees their citizens 4-6 weeks a year of vacation time. The idea is that making sure people have time to relax and rejuvenate themselves makes them more productive the rest of the year.
Americans aren’t guaranteed anything and most people take only a week or two a year if they’re lucky.
We don’t do all that well on retirement either. Most Americans don’t get much of anything from their employers anymore, and even those who had pensions are finding that in many cases, they are underfunded. Too bad.
It actually looks as if the most tragic event for our freedom was when President Roosevelt died so early in his fourth term. Roosevelt had great plans for postwar America that fell by the wayside when he wasn’t around to push them.
Nice, huh?
If FDR had lived, maybe we really could have been a free country for all, not just for the rich.
Isn’t it pretty to think so?