Dartblog

Yesterday, I attended the final event of the National Journalism Center’s internship program. While I am working for a government agency this summer, the Young America Foundation program is still of great interest to me as a conservative journalist. The intern program brings together college students from around America to intern with major media outlets while learning from NJC speakers about responsible journalism. John Fund, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, addressed the crowd. He focused his remarks on the importance of a good knowledge of American history. He told an anecdote of a friend he met in Eastern Germany as a young journalist in the 1980s who later visited him in the United States after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She told him that because Americans have never had their freedom taken away, they are instead willing to slowly give it away. She observed that because of this, the younger generation of Americans will always act like children. It is true that people of my age have little to no recollection of the Soviet Union or the iron curtain that descended across Europe following the Second World War. While September 11th was certainly the defining moment of our lives, one reason it affected us so dramatically was the element of surprise. We put enormous faith in U.S. security. Our territorial peace is usually marred only by natural disasters like earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, and hurricanes. On that September morning, these terrorists challenged our security and shattered the innocence that prevailed following the Reagan years that brought about an economic boom and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Fund explained how the loss of a sense of history has played out in presidential politics just this year. He noted that Obama is currently proposing one particular tax that Carter tried in the 1970s, but which resulted in utter failure (the fact that I can not recall the exact tax myself serves only to illustrate his point, I am ashamed to say). As education has gone soft, moving from civics and American history to the “social sciences”, we have lost the knowledge that provides key insights into the wisdom of future policy platforms. Since the Reagan years, he remarked that most Eastern European countries instituted a flat tax. Instead of continuing to cut taxes and reduce regulation, the United States has turned in a different direction, leading us into the group of the most heavily taxed populations worldwide. Whether due to a misunderstanding of economics or the rejection of these well established systems of thought, Obama and his Democrat colleagues would like to move us away from the economic success set into motion by Ronald Reagan. Fund noted that in the last 100 quarters of growth, approximately 95 have shown positive growth. We’ve moved past the outrageous inflation, unemployment, and interest rates characteristic of the troubled economy of the 1970s. Reagan certainly led the way in transforming the way Americans think about their economy. Yet the lessons of his success mean nothing to those of us who remember no differently. Having lived all our lives in a growing economy, we gain a sense of invincibility, of indestructible American power. History then, is the key. A strong knowledge of our country’s history can give us the information necessary to be informed voters and good citizens. Perhaps, armed with this knowledge, we can once again be one of the most self-reliant, industrious populations in the world, looking not to big government to satisfy our personal ills, but to ourselves.

I found Fund’s speech insightful and pertinent to my own view of the world as a college student. Hopefully the National Journalism Center interns and alumni present will spread this message to their universities. While we may not be able to immediately change public education, keeping our own failings in mind is necessary for growth.