Defining Moment
Floor Speech
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Mr. INGLIS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I think what you just said is very true. The thing I would add to it is that it is also important that we not abandon hope in the midst of that awareness. You just talked about the important awareness of the trials that we are in. We need to be very much aware.
We also, I think, need to approach them with a hope that--well, it depends on where you come from. From my perspective, it is this: The reason I have hope is I believe there is a sovereign God who is in control of all things and, furthermore, I think he is good. So if you put those two things together, I have every reason to be optimistic. Now, I do need to be aware of the risks that we face and, therefore, respond to them and anticipate them, but also with the hope that America has been through similar kinds of troubles before and met incredible challenges.
Since I serve on the Science Committee and Foreign Affairs, I always mention the scientific kind of things. I am not a scientist. I just play one occasionally on the Science Committee, by the way. But when you think about the things that the United States has done, we finished the transcontinental railroad in the midst of the Civil War. We finished the Panama Canal when the French had abandoned that effort after losing tens of thousands of people to malaria and other causes of death in Panama. We were the nation that fought and won World War II, that very quickly responded to the arms race, to Sputnik, and all of that.
In South Carolina, part of our claim to fame is the Savannah River site was and, as I understand it, still remains the largest construction project in the history of the country. All the stainless steel in the country was going to Aiken, South Carolina, to build the canyons that would develop some of the elements related to our nuclear arsenal, the bomb plant as we call it in South Carolina. Then, in 1961, President Kennedy said we must go to the Moon, make it our goal to go to the Moon before the end of the decade. And we did it, 1969.
So the amazing thing to me is that we accomplished all of those things with technology that now looks very old. The Apollo mission was all designed on the slide rule. Actually, the shuttles were designed on slide rules.
So when you take what America has done with this entrepreneurship, this belief in freedom that the gentleman was just mentioning, and charge that up in the right way so that you marshal those forces and you go out and you conquer these problems, that is what we are about. And I think what our friend just mentioned is very good about the importance of this free enterprise system and the American Dream.
To me, the American Dream is this: It is the fulfilling of the God-given desire to create, to contribute, to care, and to live at peace with one's self, one's neighbors, and one's God. That is the American Dream. And it starts with an understanding that it is the opportunity to do those things, not the guarantee. And that is, I think, what separates us from the other party is they are talking all the time about guarantee. We talk about opportunity. The gentleman from California, I think, talks about opportunity.
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Mr. INGLIS. And you mentioned ``orderliness.'' I think what we are talking about here in part and what Mr. Radanovich has been talking about is the rule of law, the importance of knowing that you can count on the rule of law to allow you to, among other things, enjoy the fruits of your labors. When you trade that away and you don't have that assurance, you have this system like you're talking about where there is stability or there is a guarantee rather than an opportunity. If you don't have the certainty that you can, because of the rule of law, have the certainty of knowing you can enjoy the fruits of your labor, then there is just less labor. It is just the way it is. That is human nature.
Dick Armey, our former majority leader, was the first person I heard say this. He said, ``Communism is that system where he who has nothing wants to share it with you.'' And so it really is a pretty good definition I think of communism. And of course I'm not accusing anyone here of advocating communism. But I do think that when you break this connection between industry, work, labor, and reward, funny things start happening. You lose incentive, and you lose the certainty of reward.
The thing that we do believe in, we Republicans advocate this thing of orderliness, or rule of law, very highly. We value that very highly because there are some economies around the world you can look at where they are blessed with many resources, but yet they lack the rule of law. And as a result, there is no certainty that your work will be rewarded, and, therefore, there just isn't as much work. There isn't as much industry. If you can't own the fruits of your labor, then you labor less. And for some people, this is a real problem. There is a deep philosophical divide that, I think the gentleman here can agree with me, we face a lot. Some people really have a Utopian view of humankind and think that we will some day move beyond this need to have a linkage between work and reward. But I think that what we realize is that, no, you will never break that link. You don't want to break that link. It is just the way it is. And so you want to make clear there is a clear linkage, and then people keep working. They keep innovating.
It is why, for example, we think that economies around the world that steal our intellectual property are so offensive to us. We think, no, we had people who worked hard, who studied hard, who invested time, energy and capital to create something, and now you have gone and stolen it and are selling it on the streets for $5 a copy when it really costs a lot more than that to develop. And some people think that is sort of Western imperialism maybe, but I think it is pretty clear that what we are talking about is effort and reward. And you have to keep those together and make opportunity for effort and reward.
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Mr. INGLIS. I would add to that, these were exceptional people that you just listed that believed in some very exceptional ideas.
I am a conservative. We are all conservatives here speaking tonight. And to some extent, conservatives are people who sort of want to keep things together the way they are. And I am also conservative philosophically as in wanting to have things like free markets and things like that. But it is also true that at times conservatives are people who want bold change, bold strokes, not just keep it the way it is, we really want to change things.
So those folks you were just mentioning were very bold in believing some pretty audacious things. Like we hold these truths to be self-evident. In other words, they are not going to make any further explanation of it. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That was a bodacious thing to say in 1776. You could say the conservative personality thing was to continue to believe in the divine right of kings. But here were these upstarts in the colonies who said no, listen, we have studied the laws of nature and of nature's God, as Mr. Jefferson said in that document, and we come to a different conclusion. And then he stated the conclusion that we hold these truths to be self-evident. I think it is very exciting just to see how bold they were.
Now fast forward to where we are today, and we have a big challenge. Our challenge today is that our pollsters tell us that for the first time in awhile, maybe in our lifetimes, people don't believe that their children will be better off than they have been. I think that is worth examining and figuring out why that is.
When we started this wonderful adventure here in the United States in 1776 with those incredible words of change and things being self-evident, we carried that on. That was sort of our heritage. As Tom Friedman writes, America is young enough and brash enough to believe that every problem has a solution.
Much of the world has long ago left that nation, but they need us, the Americans, to believe that every problem has a solution. And I would submit that it comes from the DNA we developed in 1776 when we said that all men are created equal. Hello, that is not what the rest of the world thought. And we are endowed by these certain inalienable rights. That, I would submit, carries through to the thought that yes, by my sacrifice today, or my putting my kids through college or whatever it is, can create for them a better standard of living than mine, which I think is something that has driven this country to its economic success.
It seems to me it is tied in with that DNA and that political understanding, and that comes, as the gentleman from California was saying earlier, was really from a faith understanding. So it really is connected to a series of very big thoughts in America that gets us to the place now of a big challenge, which is do we believe that our children will be better off than we are.
Unfortunately, a big number of our fellow citizens think not. I think it is worth asking, why is that and what can we do to convince them that no, really, America's best days are still ahead if we just stick to these principles, we return to our principles.
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Mr. INGLIS. I thank the gentleman for yielding. We have been describing here, I think, as the gentleman from California really started us off with the idea of what we really deeply believe with our faith really gives us a concept of respect for individual rights and the need to protect those rights. And then we have talked some about the dignity of work and protecting and affirming that dignity through the rule of law. The gentleman from Illinois was just mentioning that.
That leads us to policies. And these all flow from that deep well of what we really deeply believe and then it comes up to the surface level of instant policy or the policies of today--the policy questions of today.
The one that I think we need to answer is: Is it possible for our children to live a better life economically than we have? I think the answer is yes, as long as we do what we know works, and that is to have a system of taxation that is not confiscatory, that allows you to keep the rewards of your work. So you want to keep taxes relatively low. You want to keep regulation relatively light and effective, not burdensome, not a gotcha, but rather calculated to produce results that are reasonable, and light touch.
Then, you have got to reduce litigation somehow so that there is some certainty that you will not lose what you have done by becoming somehow the guarantor of someone else's outcome. You can't ask somebody else to guarantee their outcome. If you do that, that is the way you end up with too much litigation, and the result is that people move productive capacity away from a developed nation to an undeveloped nation.
They decide, ``Well, we will go take our risk with a less established rule of law, because in the developed country which had this rule of law, you now have such high taxation, regulation, litigation, it's too much risk for us. We are not going to get the reward.''
So, for us, really what it is, is a matter--to answer that question, whether our children's future can be brighter than ours, the answer is yes, if the top level here on what bubbles up to policy--if we keep taxes relatively low, keep regulation relatively light, and we keep litigation down, the result will be people will want to do business here and there will be opportunities for our children and our grandchildren.
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