A VISION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

THE BUSH CAMPAIGN ROLLS OUT A STRATEGY FOR NOW AND THE DISTANT FUTURE

With a deftness that even amazed his biggest fans (notably, me), the President in his stirring nomination acceptance speech managed to neatly package the two parties into the party of the 1900s (the Democrats) and the party of the Twenty-First Century. If that message can get out, and if people really understand the consequences of the vision the president is pursuing, only Michael Moore and the people who saw his movie will be voting for Kerry and company.

In case you missed it, while Kerry and Edwards whine about "good jobs" and "single payer healthcare" and "social security," and the taxing the rich, the president has actually thought through a strategy that transforms our vital institutions into workable engines for the future. Everyone knows that when Democrats say "good jobs" they mean union jobs. And everyone also knows that union jobs are factory jobs and other types of work in which you take your orders from someone else. Just after World War II, big labor made a strategic decision to give up shop-floor control (which, ironically, plays as both socialism and Bush's owner-oriented capitalism!) for, essentially, filthy lucre.

Instead of moving up from the mailroom to the Boardroom--the quintessential American dream--"good jobs" or "union jobs" offer only a lifelong tether to various forms of wage slavery. This really should play well in the Marxist community, but maybe not this year. The fact is that President Bush, while remaining as capitalist as they come, has distilled what little is right about Marx (worker ownership in preference to alienation) and mixed it with Adam Smith (less government, more personal responsibility) and come up with something that, by gum, just might work.

President Bush, while protecting us from nefarious outsiders, has evidently also been thinking about the economy with that MBA of his. Realizing that Social Security, an antiquated concept (you should excuse the expression), cannot be fixed in its current form, as the number of people who will soon be drawing on it far outweighs the number of people who will be able to pay into it for their own future, the President has devised a strategy for weaning the nation from its dependency.

Instead of dumping money into an imaginary "trust fund" that the Congress constantly raids, current social security recipients will receive what they've been promised, but those coming up behind them--the farther behind the longer they will be in the new system--are asked to save for retirement on their own, with the government's help. By the time our18-year olds reach retirement age (which will probably have moved upward by a decade at that point), their retirement will be paid for not by the government, but by their own wise choices. And that's what Republicans are all about--encouraging people to make wise choices.

When he looks at the tax code, President Bush sees a giant, tangled mess that was designed in a different century, a different world. In the new America, people will pay taxes in a more simplified system, and business owners won't need expensive tax lawyers to keep them out of jail. This is a move in the direction of Republican utopianism. Republicans love work and hate taxes. Democrats hate work and love taxes.

That may sound unfair, but it's true. The Democratic idea of making your life better isn't helping you work harder or smarter--it's giving you more money for working less. Fundamentally, Democrats dislike work. They may sing hymns to the factories, but they never seem to think of those "good jobs" as something to enjoy. Instead, they consider work to be something in which those who labor deserve to earn more than those who invest, even though that puts the workers in a position to be careless about all but the most dire of company difficulties. This leads to a tendency to want to take profits away from investors, in order to provide more cash, compensation, benefits, and other goodies to workers.

The Republican vision of work is that God set us to labor 6 days and rest one, and if they could, they would do away with taxes altogether. (Of course, neither the no-work vision or the no-tax concept could actually work; that's why they're utopian.) Republicans enjoy vacations, but they are more likely to feel guilty about what they have not earned. They resent the government redistributing income to people who have not earned it. And they see those "good jobs" that the Democrats love to hype so much as mere stepping stones to eventual up-the-ladder success. A real Republican takes a job in a factory or as a waitress in order to move on to a better job, not the same job at better pay. A Democrat expects to be paid more every year for doing the same work--because that's what the party and the union bosses have told him is "fair."

But if you examine those assumptions, what's fair about them? If there is no rise in the cost of living, if there is no inflation, if there are many other people who would like to do those jobs better than the person who works only to get more money--why should they get a raise? Why should the entrepreneur be punished by not being able to reinvest in capital improvement just because the worker who isn't any more productive expects to be paid more? Republicans recognize that you improve your situation by either becoming better at what you do (and, therefore, more valuable), moving up into a better-compensated position, or going somewhere that pays better in the first place.

Democrats don't get that.

But the economy actually works better with more people working productively and moving up in the system. The lower-skilled jobs are filled by entry-level workers, those workers move into better jobs; eventually many of them start their own businesses. In this country, millions of people have started their own businesses in the past year. It is an astonishing trend, one the unemployment statistics utterly fail to reflect. And President Bush wants to see it continue.

A nation that hands out money for no work is a nation that teaches laziness and dependency--and reaps the whirlwind of selfishness and poverty. A nation that offers a hand up and out of poverty is a nation of compassionate conservatism--that produces a harvest of proud citizens invested in the continuing good health of the nation, able to see beyond our own shores to those who haven't yet come to that vision.

Rather than stick to perfecting our own Jerusalem, George W. Bush sees a nation in the future that can have the luxury of sharing its own wealth of knowledge and resources, as well as the track record (with a foundation laid by the last 200 years Ahnold reminded us of) to attract the world to the American way of life. By shoring up our own financial stability, by re-teaching our own citizens to stand on their own two feet without expecting the government to do anything more than get out of their way, we strengthen the whole of the nation. And by building a stronger nation, we remain the force that stabilizes the world.