A Different Time

My wife and I being truck drivers that are ready to come off the road were talking the other day at breakfast about what we could do to simplify our life. The talk turned to getting clothes line poles made, not only because it would save some money but also because my wife likes the way sheets and clothes smell when they have been dried on the line. While talking about it we realized that when we bought our house in Virginia in the early 90’s we walked into a local home improvement store and bought clothes line poles, now we were having to think about who could make them. We have looked and can not find them in the home improvement stores, at least not in our area, and we live in a rural area. I questioned why we couldn’t find ready made poles anymore and my wife brought up the point that nowadays usually both members of the family work during the day and clothes don’t dry too good on the line at night. Besides realizing that I was questioning not being able to find ready made poles instead of making them myself, it made me realize how much our way of life has changed in this country.

When you start talking to your parents or grandparents about how things were when they were young they are quick to point out that life was not easy. If you were a farmer you were working 7 days a week, if you worked for someone else there were long hours and 6 day work weeks. The discussion normally gets around to the fact that they didn’t have what we have now, and that is true. But what do we have that makes it so much greater? What have we lost that they had? As far as history goes it’s not been that long ago where only one member of the household had to work to make ends meet. Then again the definition of making ends meet has changed, so has the definition of being fiscally conservative.

In 1950 Diners Club and America Express launched their credit card campaign on America. It started with 200 Diners Club cards being issued in 1951 that could only be used in certain restaurants; that started the revolution of plastic money. Credit has been around for centuries in one form or another, but plastic money has only been around for a little over a half a century. Credit used to be hard to obtain, you had to prove you were deserving of credit, you had to prove you could pay off the credit, and you had to do so in a relatively short period of time. Today you have to be in debt up to your eyeballs to get credit which probably means you won’t be paying off that credit any time in the near future. At one time credit was only granted if the reason for the credit was a sound one, starting a business that was actually needed or being able to buy seed to plant a crop for harvest the following fall. Today all you have to do is say I want, and you can get credit. That want may be a newer car, or a bigger boat, or a house that would quarter the entire 82nd Airborne, it doesn’t have to make sense. Keeping up with the Joneses has become more important then providing for your family.

Both sets of my Grandparents lived in modest homes. They were large enough to keep the rain off their heads. They didn’t need dens, recreation rooms, his and her sinks and tubs or even separate rooms for each child; they needed to provide a roof over their heads with enough left over to put food in their stomachs. Today we want to have a TV in every room, computers for each member of the family, cell phones for everyone old enough to walk and a new car for anyone legal to drive in the driveway. I’m guilty of at least some of this thinking also. With all of this we wonder why the United States in the financial situation it is in.

Today if a person does not earn enough to have what the next guy has we consider it to be a travesty, it used to mean we just didn’t have all the luxuries in life. In days gone by if you wanted something that was considered a luxury you would work a little extra and save until you could afford it. Today all you have to do is fill out a credit application or try and get a Government subsidy; is this really helping? Prior to the introduction of the Social Security Act in 1935 there was no permanent Government sponsored welfare program. Prior to 1935 welfare existed on a local level, usually at the county level. Local Governments ran poorhouses and orphanages. If it was determined that a person needed assistance other then that which they could obtain from family and friends they could be placed into a poorhouse. Children that had lost their parents or the parents were deemed unfit to care for them could be placed in orphanages. Neither of these places was considered to be nice places to go to, they weren’t meant to be. Benjamin Franklin was credited with the following quote “I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it”. That was the attitude of the early American poorhouses and orphanages, they did not want to make people comfortable in their poverty but they did provide a place they could be taken care of. Today whether you are willing to work for a living or not it is expected that you will have they same privileges and luxuries as the working class; there seems to be a gate to the upper class that will not be breached. People today just do not think about what they have to do to survive, somehow that is a bad thing, just to survive. What people think today is which credit card I can use to get that flat screen for the bedroom. We have turned around living within our means to mean “just surviving”.

There has been a popular bumper sticker since I was in my teens, “he who dies with the most toys wins”. Instead of being a comical bumper sticker it has become a whole generation’s mantra. What I haven’t figured out is whether that mantra was planted by the Government or the Government saw what the publics’ attitude was and saw an opportunity to push the progressive agenda. I personally believe it was the former. America has always had those that wanted a strong central Government with more control then what the Constitution allows. Prior to the 1900’s the Government went through ups and downs but the people still seemed to keep the Government reigned in enough to be manageable. It is believed that Grover Cleveland was one of the last true conservative Presidents to be in office before the progressive movement really took hold. Starting sometime around the Woodrow Wilson administration the progressive movement got a toehold. There were still a couple like William Harding and Calvin Coolidge that stalled the progressive move but it was not enough to stop it.

In 1909 President Theodore Roosevelt started that ball rolling with a White Conference on how best to deal with poor mothers and their children, the result of this conference was the beginning of the mothers’ pension programs. The first one started in Illinois in 1911; by 1933 all but 2 states had mothers’ pension programs. These programs were run by the States but they were the brainchild of the Federal Government. With the explosion of unemployed at the beginning of the Great Depression State programs and private charities were unable to keep up with the demand for help. In his State of the Union address before Congress in January of 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared "the time has come for action by the national government" to provide "security against the major hazards and vicissitudes [uncertainties] of life." By August of 1935 the Social Security Act was born.

There are different schools of thought as to whether the Government actually caused the Depression to be worse then it should have been or not. One thing that should be clear is that any program the Government put into place to ease the suffering during the Depression should have had a sunset; it should have gone away once the economy recovered to a point that the assistance was no longer required. But in the true fashion of the Progressive the Government used the Depression as the crisis necessary to advance the Progressive movement. With the birth of Social Security we can also mark the planting of the seeds for all other Government assistance programs and the death of fiscal responsibility in America.

At the beginning of this I asked what have we lost that they had? It is my personal belief that there is much that we have lost. We have lost our sense of fiscal responsibility and we have lost our individuality. George Carlin once did a piece in one of his shows about what is wrong with America. He sums it up with the fact that it’s not our politicians that are the problem, it’s us. The politicians are selected from us by us, they are representatives of the American people therefore we are the ones that have allowed our country to get to the state it is in now and we are the only ones that have any hope of turning it around. If we expect our politicians to showed fiscal responsibility then we need to show it ourselves. We need to restore the definition of making ends meet to what it used to be. We need to learn to live within our means. There is nothing wrong with having luxuries, as long as you can truly afford them. We need to learn to do without at times and learn how to do for ourselves more.

Steve Avery
6/12/11