I just read a fascinating post on Robert Ringer’s Voice of Sanity
blog called “The Mindset of Success” by Wayne Allyn Root.
Mr. Root’s central theme is, conservative thinkers are happier than liberal thinkers because they have a deeper sense of self-reliance.
Mr. Root writes:
What leads to happiness is freedom for the individual — free markets, the freedom to make choices, the freedom to keep your own money and decide what to do with it, and freedom from government interference in your life. None of us is guaranteed happiness the day we are born. As great as the United States is, no government can guarantee happiness. But what our Founding Fathers did guarantee was the freedom to pursue our own happiness.
[In a] study, released by the Pew Research Center … called the “Pew Social & Demographic Trends Project” … [t]he dramatic partisan “happiness gap” that Pew found in favor of Republicans has held steady for nearly four decades — since 1972, when surveys funded by the National Science Foundation first began to ask the happiness question.
Remarkably, it has remained consistent during both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. Republicans weren’t just happier under Reagan or Bush, they were also happier under Carter and Clinton. And no doubt they’ll be happier under Obama as well.
The Pew study indicates this phenomenon has nothing to do with political party affiliation. It’s a mindset many people around the world from every culture on earth exhibit: People with conservative attitudes tend to be happier than people with liberal attitudes.
In his book The Liberal Mind, Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter explains why freedom makes one happier:
[In] providing for his own material and interpersonal well-being, and the well-being for those for whom he has assumed responsibility, the competent person has no need of parental services. While always humanly fallible and vulnerable, and always subject to failure and loss, his efforts to run his life through his own initiative ordinarily suffice well enough and are personally satisfying in their own right.
In particular, he has no need or desire for the government to assume a task that he is able to perform for himself, with or without the assistance of others. Beyond certain very limited though critical government functions, such as the protection of property and contract rights, military defense against other nations, and the coordination of those relatively few matters best regulated as public goods, the competent man desires only to be let alone by the government in order that he may continue to live his life as he chooses – while he honors the rights of others to do the same.
That begs the question: In the greatest, most free country on earth, why are so many Americans looking for the government to create “a level playing field”? Why do so many of us look to the government to create some sort of “economic justice” for (presumably) all of us? What is “economic justice”? Will your definition include or exclude me? or my family?
In my view over half the American electorate needs to grow up. People who believe these things need to do a little basic research on economics and realize our problem isn’t the economy. The economy’s doing what it’s supposed to do. Throughout our history, good and bad economies have come and gone. It’s the natural cycle of free, capitalist, open markets.
So grow up, America!
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