Campaign Promises; R. Heiple, II

CAMPAIGN PROMISES tg Rae e. jJeiple~ II INFLATION THE forgotten man. . . . A cross of gold. . . . Green backs for all. . . . Yes, down through the years we have heard the calls. Calls mouthed by even the stammering tot.... A car in the garage; a chicken in the pot. French, Spaniards, Phoenicians, and Greeks-all knew the shortcut to abundance. Simple? Of coursel Clip the coin, dilute the metal, issue script, and roll the presses. Money buys things, doesn't it? Well, make money! More money to circulate to stimulate trade, for better distribu tion, and employment for all. Oh, yes, we've heard the call. The promises sparkle; they always sound new. But the story is as old as time, as unchanging as hu man nature. No matter how many times it has been tried, what name was given to it, who administered the plan, or what the honesty and good intentions, inflation has always brought poverty, not abundance. It always will. It is as simple as AB,C. It is sure as rain.

Mr. Heiple is a young attorney from Washington, Illinois. These are some of the messages he used to win a 1958 Primary fight for State Representative. 302 CAMPAIGN PROMISES 303 The reason: man responds to incentives. He will work if rewarded. He· will not work without reward. He will save if it is profitable to save. He will not save if it does not profit him to save. He will not save if he can get no interest on his money, or if his money deteriorates in value. We don't save old pancakes, and· we won't save dollars either if they are going to be less and less valu able every year. Saved money is what bought every diesel railroad loco motive in the U. S. today. It bought every lathe, broach, and milling machine. Yet, the men, widows, and children who loaned the money to buy these machines to produce our abundance were fools. Inflation made them fools. $2,500 in 1939 would have built a house; now it will barely buy a good automobile. How long will people save if this continues? How long before they "wise up" and stop providing new locomotives and lathes? It will be when the savers realize inflation is here for good. We will then have had it.

Inflation destroys ambition and creativeness. It de frauds the honest and punishes the thrifty. It is caused by government living beyond its means, by deficit, by manipulation and manufacture of money, by tampering with interest rates and credit expansion, by confiscation and redistribution. FREEDOM OF CHOICE Someone figured it out.... We have 143,791 laws to enforce the Ten Commandments.

304 RAE C. HEIPLE, II Suppose you should want to shoe a horse tomorrow. The policeman won't let you. If your neighbor wants to haul your garbage to the dump, he isn't permitted. If your cousin Rachel, on the old farm, should continue her egg and cream route, just bring her next birthday present to the jailhouse. Ridiculous, you say? YeslRidiculous because it is true. It used to be that if you were a good horseshoer, you were in business; and if you sold ripe eggs, you weren't. But not anymore. Nowadays it seems that people aren't as smart as they used to be. All the smart ones must be in the legislature. No longer can we tell for ourselves whether an egg is rotten, whether the garbage man can haul garbage, or whether the shoe stays on the horse. Whether there ought to be a law or not, there is. It would be comical if it were not so pathetic. The rationale of this "big brother" philosophy is based on a faulty premise and constructed of fallacious reason ing. Its absurd reasoning is this: (1) Most people are so dumb that they don't know what is good for them; (2) The elected officials and appointed bureaucrats are so smart that they know what is good for others; (3) That by regulation, license, and code, everyone is going to get what the officials think the people should have. So runs their argument. Ridiculous? Yes! To say that you and I don't have the judgment to choose a competent garbage man, horseshoer, barber, or plumber is an insult to our intelligence. Yet we are permitting ourselves to be so in suI ted in each of these fields.

CAMPAIGN PROMISES 305 To say that 235 men in Springfield can pick every com petent and discard every incompetent barber, plumber, horseshoer, and garbage man in the whole state of Illinois is a statement of absolute and supreme arrogance. Yet every time a license is granted or refused, it is state pronouncement of competency or incompetency. To say that regulation and license guarantee good work is incredible. Just ask your barber or plumber some time about their inspection and supervision. Ask them if it assures competent men and qualified work. They'll tell you it's a joke. All it does is create a lot of political jobs. Our country is built on freedom-on the right of each individual to choose for himself what he wants-even though we might have made a different choice. You can not protect people from their own ignorance. You can not, by legislation, abolish mistakes. Freedom includes the right to make a mistake as well as the right to make a wise choice.

ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE I t seems to be the popular trend nowadays to proclaim your devotion to everyone. A candidate just isn't unless he is for business, for labor, for farmers, for producers, for consumers, and for everything that costs money. No one is content to grow up and admit there is no Santa Claus. For a good many years we have been kidding ourselves that the government should and could guarantee every 306 RAE C. HEIPLE, II employment and economic group a better deal than the next. That crackpot scheme worked OK for awhile. It worked just about as long as the chain-Ietter-get-rich scheme. It goes over big for the first ones to get in the promotion, but pretty soon everyone is promoting and there aren't any "fall guys" left. The idea of an above average standard of living for everyone is, of course, a contradiction and impossible on its face, if you should think about it. What I am trying to say is that individuals create their own success and prosperity. If you get the government to give you something it has taxed away from another, that fellow and countless others are going to get theirs by taxing you. And you can't blame them. It's a matter of self-defense.

The farmers may be receiving benefits, but they are in turn being taxed to benefit labor, consumer, business, banking, and so on. The same is true for each of the other groups. It is all just a lot of wasted effort applied to a very inefficient machine. You never get out what you put in. RIGHTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL In the progress of history we have had the Stone Age, the Iron Age, and the Machine Age. We are today living in what some have called the Age of Conformity .... the age in which the quest for security has displaced oppor tunity. The accent today is on the group. The individual is of little concern. The mass is all that matters.

CAMPAIGN PROMISES 307 This false doctrine is shot through our whole society. Schools are geared in accordance with the norm and ig· nore individual ability and special talent. Law puts so· cial responsibility ahead of individual rights. Politicians cry for the good of the greatest number without a thought of the individuals who suffer. Economists study institutions, not people. The end result of this kind of thinking is the worship of the government as an idol-to believe that it can do anything except something wrong-that the unfailing way to find right, truth, and justice is to take a popu· larity poll. We act as if the State can feed us when we are hungry, heal us when we are ill, raise wages and lower prices at the same time, educate our children without costs, give us electricity by passing laws, and improve the game of baseball with regulations. We need just pass a law and then stand back and be overwhelmed with all the goodness of life.

Let's try to be sensible for awhile. It is the differences in people that make possible our progress. The object in education is to develop your own special abilities to their utmost, not to conform. We as individuals have rights that the majority cannot take away from us. It is time we used our common sense. Hard work, not legislation, makes production. Production, not regula. tion, makes prosperity. The legislature cannot amend the laws of economics anymore than it can the law of gravity.