What the past can teach us

While we shouldn’t live in the past, we can certainly learn from it. We are not the first generation to walk the earth, and yet too many, especially the young, suffer from the conceit that history is just a boring subject in school.

PBS is rerunning its award-winning series American Experience on modern presidents and the domestic and foreign policy challenges they faced. Each episode retraces what presidents believed to be good ideas at the time—from Lyndon Johnson’s program to wipe out poverty and defeat the communists in Vietnam, to George W. Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein. Historians, as well as members of those administrations, are interviewed and provide perspective only hindsight can give.

One scene in the LBJ segment is particularly instructive when thinking about the two main candidates in the current presidential race. During consideration of Johnson’s pledge to create a “Great Society,” there is film of him signing a large stack of bills passed by the majority Democratic Congress. The narrator says the bills were passed and signed so quickly no one had any idea what the programs would cost, or how they would be implemented.

This is the heart of liberalism. Little consideration is given to whether a program or idea will accomplish its stated goal, only intentions matter.

In a speech last week in Warren, Mich., Hillary Clinton borrowed from the past, not to learn from it, but to repeat it. “On Day One,” she said, “I’m going to convene experts from both parties. We are going to put together the best job-creation bill we have ever had.” She followed with recycled promises to repair infrastructure, such as bridges, highways, and airports.

Those with short memories may have forgotten her pledges have been tried in the very recent past. Remember President Obama’s “stimulus”? Remember “shovel-ready jobs,” which even the president and Vice President Joe Biden joked weren’t shovel-ready after all when they didn’t materialize? Remember the infrastructure repair Obama promised?

Government doesn’t create jobs in the private economy. Government can get out of the way by lowering taxes and reducing unnecessary regulations, stimulating the private sector. Clinton wants to do the reverse. In her view, government has all the answers when, in fact, it has few. If it had answers, the problems we face would have long ago been solved. After so many failures, why would voters continue to trust government to fix anything?

Clinton again is using the liberal code word “investment.” She means spending. As the debt approaches $20 trillion, a wise person might say we need to spend less, not more, starting with reforming entitlement programs, which consume a great deal of the budget. Would any business survive a sales strategy that has failed so dramatically? Only government demands it be worshipped as the source of all goodness and authority, even though it repeatedly demonstrates it is incapable of fulfilling its promises.

President Obama has tried everything Hillary Clinton is proposing. It hasn’t worked. Economic growth is stagnant and the under 5 percent unemployment figure masks a labor force that has either given up looking for work or working part time or is working at jobs that pay less than the employee previously earned.

Obamacare continues to be a burden. Insurance companies are pulling out due to its high cost. And taxes will soon rise.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And those who sell us more big government “solutions” never seem to learn.

© 2016 Tribune Content Agency LLC.