Personal Responsibility; D. C. Huff

- HENRY GRADY WEAVER T he idea of personal responsibility lies at the heart of a free society. When respon sibilities are shunned at the individual level, there is an eventual impact on all those around us. Let us examine some examples from key areas of public policy.In each case it should be clear, as Henry Grady Weaver has noted, that "Any at tempt to give to government the responsibilities which properly belong to the individual citizens works at cross-purposes to the advancement of personal freedom. It retards progress-morally as well as along the lines of greater productivity."1 Before the beginning of government-support ed education, parents fulfilled the duties of train ing their children in a variety of ways. While home schooling and church-based schools were common, education was also available through educational missionary societies, especially for the poor. Interestingly, private and home schools haven't been eradicated by today's massive network of state-controlled education. One reason is that private education is responsive to the demands of the market-its survival is dependent upon its performance. If a particular school isn't educating students effectively,it will be replaced by one of better quality.

Educators in private schools tend to have more time to devote to teaching, meeting the re quirements of parents rather than those of the DavidC. Huff is chieffinancialofficerofan Atlanta-based manufacturers'representative. education bureaucracy. Such a focus will always produce a better product-in this case, a quality education. When parents began to delegate educational responsibilities to the government, a decline soon followed. A variety of educational options were lost through standardization; academic excellence gave way to decreasing quality; freedom of mo bility and choice became hindered by such tactics as busing. Probably the most sobering aspect of what happens to freedom when the personal responsi bility for education is handed over to the state is the issue of authority. As Gary North has written: Naturally, parents have to delegate responsibil ity to someone. Few parents have the time or skills to educate their children at home. But the fundamental principle of education is the tutor. . . . Parents hire specialists to teach their children along lines established by par ents. The private school is simply an extension of this principle, with several parents hiring a tutor, thereby sharing the costs. But the par ents, not the tutor, are institutionally sovereign. Since sovereignty must bear the costs, education should be parent-financed.

Anything else is a transfer of authority over education to an imitation family.2 Since the transfer of authority involves the transfer of control, the impact of our decisions in the area of education warrants serious examina tion. Our prisons, and indeed our entire criminal justice system, would benefit greatly from a stronger emphasis upon personal responsibility. A philosophy of offender rehabilitation which simply attributes criminal acts to the "environ ment," while concentrating resources primarily on building more prisons, misses the crucial is sues of responsibility and restitution. This helps explain the failure of most prisons to reform their inmates for a successfulreturn to society. The weaknesses inherent in such environmen tal determinism should be replaced by policies that require convicts to make adequate restitu tion to their victims whenever possible. Financial restitution, for instance, could be paid by the pris oner from his earnings through work in some type of prison industry. Coupled with sentencing that accurately reflects the degree of offense, thereby teaching accountability, such a program would encourage lasting rehabilitation based on personal responsibility.

As Charles Colson has pointed out: ". . . working with the purpose of paying back some one you have wronged allows a criminal to un derstand and deal with the real consequences of his actions. . . . Studies of model restitution pro grams demonstrate that they greatly reduce the incidence of further crime, since they restore a sense of individual responsibility,thus making the offender more likely to be able to adjust to soci ety." 3 The trend away from personal responsibility has also become evident in the health care and social service fields, where the state is increasing ly·viewed as a surrogate parent owing benefits to its citizen-children. Attempting to fulfill these de manding expectations, governments at all levels chum out program after program-Social Securi ty,.welfare, food stamps, Medicare, and the like. This effort also generates an array of legisla tion aimed at businesses, forcing them to bear an increasing share of the costs of many forms of employee protection and benefits. In turn, these added expenses are passed along to consumers, both through outright price increases and bu reaucracy-induced inefficiencies.

As with other services, health care and social welfare programs are most effectively provided by the private sector. Cotton Lindsay has written: "Long before governments took an active role in 273 thi~ area churches and charitable groups cared for the poor. I have seen no evidence that their health or anyone else's is better served now by our own or any other form of government medicine."4 Few areas of public policy impact our daily lives in so many tangible ways, and yet are more misunderstood and debated, than the broad field of economics. But it is here that the principle of personal responsibility has especially wide appli cation. For instance: • One of the foundations of free enterprise is the incentive of profit, as well as the risk of loss, for the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur's success or failure in the marketplace hinges on how re sponsibly he controls costs, manages workers, and guides his business toward satisfyingthe con sumer. Government intervention or redistribu tion, in whatever form, hampers the accurate measure of a businessman's effectiveness in these areas. This allows marginal businesses to stay afloat by avoiding the market's consequences for their inefficiencies.

• Government unemployment programs are rife with abuse, allowing people to live off the state while taking an excessive amount of time to find employment. Such a situation rarely encour ages workers to gain new, marketable skills,but it does allow responsibility to slip from the individ ual to the state. • Taxation makes it difficult for many citizens to meet their personal financial responsibilities. As time passes, more and more families adopt an attitude of resignation, and fall back on govern ment aid. The concept of personal responsibility per vades every area of our public lives. Those who would promote the principles of freedom should always be alert to this concept, and seek to un derstand the importance of its application. 0 1. Henry Grady Weaver, The Mainspringof Human Progress, (Foundationfor EconomicEducation,1953),p. 61. 2. Gary North, UnconditionalSurrender:God's Program For Victory, 2nd ed. (Tyler,Texas: Geneva DivinitySchoolPress,1983), p.95.

3. CharlesColson,"Crime and Restitution,"PolicyReview,No. 43 (Winter1988),p. 18. 4. Cotton Lindsay,Clemson University,quoted in "Medicare and the Myth of Equality,"by Mark D. Hughes, The Free Market (Ludwigvon MisesInstitute,September1988),p. 3.