Republican Party needs a renewal

All political parties drift and evolve over time. The Alaska Republican Party is no different and has been in a values drift over the past few years along with the rest of the nation. It’s time for a renewal.

Renewals in political parties occur from time to time. One example is when Ronald Reagan steered the Republican Party back toward its roots in the 1980s after nearly two decades of spectacular government growth perpetuated by both parties.

The current economic malaise plaguing the U.S. economy like sleeping sickness is very similar to the malaise we experienced in the 1970s. The recession back then, like today, clung on tenaciously and confounded every effort by the most eminent government tinkerers to free us from its grip. When additional laws and regulations failed to work, we fired up the printing press and flooded the economy with money to try to jump-start the economy. This resulted in wild inflation, but actually had the opposite effect on the economy, which shrank or stagnated while prices soared under a previously thought impossible economic condition called stagflation.

Today, we are doing much the same thing by trying to regulate virtually every sector of our economy and are printing money to the tune of $85 billion per month. The difference today is that we are using printed money to buy government bonds to try to keep interest rates low. Last quarter, the economy shrank. German philosopher Hegel once said, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

The error in political thinking both then and now is that an economy can be centrally managed like a machine if you just regulate it well enough and control its inputs and outputs. This ignores the human factor of the equation — the spirit of an economy. At different times people are driven either by fears, hopes or dreams. They can be optimistic about the future and have the courage to risk their precious capital on a new business expansion. Or conversely, they can feel pessimistic about the future, which can cause them to avoid unnecessary risk, sit on their hands and try to ride the storm out. The historical lesson that central planners never seem to learn is that the weight of excessive government crushes the spirit of an economy and no amount of government tinkering will force it back into prosperity. The human element of the equation is the missing link that the Republican Party of the 1970s forgot and today’s Republican Party has largely forgotten.

Reagan was a student of the founding fathers and how they created the framework for two centuries of the most spectacular economic growth the world has ever seen. Our founding fathers didn’t legislate or regulate the American dream — they merely released it from centuries of royal and bureaucratic regulation. They created the framework whereby Americans could succeed by the sweat of their own brows and live the life of their own dreams. It didn’t guarantee success, but provided more opportunity for economic greatness than arguably all the history of humankind that preceded it.

Reagan realized that Americans were too heavily burdened by excessive government and therefore reduced taxes, regulation and stopped inflation at the money printing press. Entrepreneurs now had less weight of government on their shoulders and weren’t robbed by double-digit inflation.

Reagan then stoked the spirit of the economy by promising a new morning in America. He realized that the American dream didn’t exist in an institution, a factory or a government. It burned in the heart of every American and just waited to be released from the crushing weight of government.

How well did his plan work? Between 1983 and 1989, the economy grew by a staggering 31 percent in real terms and created 14 million new jobs in what Europe at the time called the “American Miracle.” The European economy stagnated during the same time period as it tinkered with an economy with higher taxes, more regulation and government health care.

The Republican Party needs to become the party of the free individual once again. We need to realign ourselves with the founding fathers’ vision that recognized that excessive government isn’t the solution to mankind’s problems, but the cause of them. The dream that is America is the freedom and responsibility of the individual creating a brighter future for themselves, their families and their communities.

Our founders fervently believed that by returning freedom back to the individual they could begin the world over again and as you know they did just that. Today the black cloud of global socialism is descending everywhere across America and is creating an internal identity crisis in the Republican Party. It’s time to pick up the torch of liberty and use it to illuminate our path to the future.

Daniel Hamm lives in Palmer and is an international Boeing 747 freight pilot.