THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 30, 1996 TAG: 9603300001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Pat Lackey
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
For nearly the first two-thirds of this century, lotteries were illegal in every state. Today they're legal in 37 states and the District of Columbia. In 1988, two states had casino gambling. Today, 24 states do.
What was illegal became legal as government's image of itself changed.
Earlier in the century, government was a moral arbiter. Gambling was believed to contribute to and prey on weakness of character; hence government opposed it. Government attempted to promote those qualities that make good citizens, like thrift and readiness to work.
Today government - state or federal - sees itself as morally neutral. It promotes individual freedom, rather than individual morality. Many people view taxes as coercive and gambling as voluntary and so consider gambling the more honorable source of government revenue - certainly preferable to a tax increase. Individuals are free to spend entire paychecks on the lottery. Let freedom reign.
People shouldn't conclude that government favors gambling, just because government sponsors it. To gamble or not is an individual's decision. Government is merely in it for the money.
Government today is ``concerned less with cultivating virtue than with enabling persons to choose their own values,'' wrote Michael J. Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University and author of the book Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Policy, to be published next month by Harvard University Press. An excerpt appears in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Sandel argues that when we neglect cultivating virtue, when we place individual freedom first and last, we get a citizenry unfit to govern itself. Eventually individual freedom, though valued, is squandered, and the ability to self-govern is lost.
Similarly today, the best form of economy is the one that affords the most freedom. The French term for such an economy is laissez-faire. The Spanish term is que sera sera.
Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia in 1787, took the old view that the best economy was the one most conducive to formation of a citizenry capable of governing itself. He favored an agrarian economy because he worried, as Sandel put it, ``that large-scale manufacturing would create a propertyless class, lacking the independence that republican citizenship requires.'' Jefferson wrote, ``The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.'' Jefferson favored having Americans grow good crops and good citizens, leaving manufacturing and city squalor to the Europeans.
Today's economic debates focus on the best ways to increase the gross domestic product and how wealth created should be distributed - not on the effects of our economy on citizens' fitness to self-govern.
Much of Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan's message is: Hey, let's look at the harm we're doing to ourselves with NAFTA, etc. His concern, however, is less with cultivating good citizenship than with keeping wealth in the country.
Two Democratic U.S. senators - Thomas Daschle of South Dakota and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts - are pushing a plan that seems to spring from the distant past. They want the government to form a special category for corporations that take certain steps the senators favor: Offer broad profit-sharing plans, spend an amount equal to 2 percent of payroll on worker training, pay the top officer no more than 50 times what the lowest employee makes, etc. The supposedly do-gooder corporations would receive tax breaks and preferential treatment in government regulations and contracts.
The senators' plan might be batty. A corporation's first responsibility is to turn a profit, which is to say, to survive. All the best intentions mean nothing if the company turns belly up. Government cannot wish wealth into being.
Still the senators are attempting to use government's power over the economy to produce a situation that the senators believe would form better citizens.
The case can be made that a person holding down two jobs, with no retirement or health benefits, may lack the resources, including time, to be what the country needs: a good family member and citizen. Repeated massive layoffs surely diminish many citizens' belief in the work ethic.
Bigger, more coercive government is the wrong answer. But government should not pretend that it is purely neutral when it sponsors gambling and accepts whatever distribution of income economic forces produce.
Everything government does has consequences, intended or otherwise. Government should consider more often which consequences would contribute to a citizenry fit to govern itself. When low voter turnouts are normal, something's seriously wrong. MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB