RALEIGH – The Hood family had a wonderful, magical white Christmas in 2010. I hope you did, too. I hope you found joy in the innocence of children, the laughter of friends, and the love that both led to and flows from the Great Gift we commemorate at the end of every year.
I hope you find the season inspiring and rejuvenating, because hard times face North Carolina, the nation, and the world. There are tough decisions to be made. There are implacable enemies abroad and intractable problems at home.
Now is the time for serious leadership. I worry, however, that we have too few serious leaders.
The maturity required for serious leadership does not preclude joviality. Indeed, some of the greatest leaders in history have possessed a keen sense of humor that helped them keep things in perspective and reassure a worried public. The truly worrisome alternative to serious leadership is the political equivalent of perpetual adolescence.
Those local, state, and national leaders who think our fiscal woes can be solved with fairy-tale economics or populist demagoguery exhibit all the worst traits of teenagers. They espouse immediate gratification at the expense of scrimping and saving for the future. They rebel mindlessly against authority, all the while expecting someone else to picking up their tab. And they possess just enough knowledge to get themselves into trouble but not enough to get themselves out of it.
They can whine, yell, and throw tantrums. It still won’t change the facts. Government is too big, too costly, and too intrusive. The taxpayers can’t afford to pay for all the government the political class has promised them. Nor are there enough “others” – rich people, international investors, etc. – for politicians to burglarize to make the government’s math add up.
Increasing the rate of economic growth will help balance budgets, at least in the short run, but as former Federal Reserve governor Larry Lindsey explains in a recent Weekly Standard piece, manipulating GDP growth and interest rates can never substitute for cutting government spending. The Erskine Bowles-Alan Simpson commission may not have produced the right mix of policies at the federal level, but at least it was an attempt at serious leadership.
North Carolina needs it right now. Gov. Beverly Perdue and the incoming Republican legislature seem committed to eliminating a 16 percent gap in the state budget without raising taxes. Good. They’ll need help. You can be sure that the spending lobbies who derive their incomes from taxes will fight tooth and nail to protect their own pots of money. Taxpayers don’t have quite the same lobbying apparatus in Raleigh.
Christmas is a time to renew one’s generosity of spirit. True generosity is, of course, a trait of voluntary action. It is moral and praiseworthy to be generous with your own talents, efforts, and possessions. To seek to be generous with other people’s talents, efforts, and possessions, without securing their permission, is immoral and detestable. It is larcenous.
Because progressives seem not to understand this basic distinction, they routinely employ holiday images to justify the welfare state. They can’t seem to tell the difference between giving and taking. They see a fellow clad in red going down a chimney, and can’t tell the difference between Santa Claus and the Grinch.
Santa Claus embodies the spirit of giving. He acts out of love. The Grinch embodies the spirit of taking. He acts out of envy. And once he has a change of heart and returns all the possessions he stole, the Grinch doesn’t expect to be lauded for his generosity. It wasn’t his stuff to begin with.
So, yes, serious leadership is fully consistent with the whimsy and wonder of the season. By all means, have yourself a merry little Christmas. Let your heart be light. Then, brace yourself for a fight. The adolescents still hold a great deal of power, inside and outside of government. They are the kind of folks who never, ever seem to get what they want for Christmas. They’ll be looking for someone else to blame. They always do.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.