I’d like to thank Gideon Strauss of the Center for Public Justice and Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute for their gracious and thoughtful contributions to the discussion of “A Call for Intergenerational Justice” at last night’s Open Mic Night in Grand Rapids. It was an excellent example of the kind of spirited and good natured dialogue we need in confronting the problems of poverty and the national debt.
Earlier this week I pointed out that there was indeed a lot in the “Call” to be recommended. It takes the question of the debt seriously and makes hard recommendations involving both cuts to federal spending and tax increases. Both will be necessary tools for addressing this issue.
My problem with “A Call for Intergenerational Justice” is that I don’t believe these two tools, while both necessary, are sufficient to address the crisis alone. In the short term cuts in federal spending will affect many adversely and tax increases will place an additional burden on an economy still struggling to emerge out of a recession.
The precarious place we now find ourselves in has many causes. Government spending that has grown to unsustainable levels and tax cuts funded by borrowing (Which are, in the long term, not genuine tax cuts at all) have both played a role. But what has fueled the deficit most in recent years is the recession itself and the tragically misguided attempts by the federal government to lift us out of it.
What we desperately need is a third tool, economic liberalization, which would promote economic growth. Here are four broad principals of economic liberalization which, if they had been included, would have made “A Call for Intergenerational Justice” a document not just worth thoughtful consideration and debate but something worth getting behind:
- We need to open more markets to American goods and services and open them more widely.
- We need to lower barriers (in the form of regulation) and cost (in the form of taxation) to doing business and creating jobs domestically.
- We need to lower regulatory barriers for entrepreneurs to enter the marketplace by streamlining or cutting red tape.
- We need to look seriously at intellectual property law and strike a better balance between rewarding innovation and promoting competition.
