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Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind... Romans 12:2

Forgetting What He Learned

by Ken Ewert

As Robert Fulford, writing in the National Post, notes, "Every 10 years or so, George McGovern comes up with a new thought." McGovern, as most know, was the left-wing Democrat who suffered the most lop-sided loss in presidential election history to Richard Nixon in 1972.

In 1972 McGovern seemed to think government intervention was the solution to most anything. But in 1992, after voters retired him from politics, McGovern bought and ran the Stratford Inn, a hotel in Connecticut. Out of this experience, McGovern had some new insights to offer: He told a Los Angeles Times reporter that running a business "gives you a whole new perspective on what other people worry about." As Fulford writes: "He now saw for the first time that public policy was choking entrepreneurs by entangling them in impossible red tape and a multitude of laws designed to protect employees, save the environment, keep the customers safe, and raise school taxes. He realized that the politicians who wrote those laws had no idea that they might make it impossible for some businesses to function. He confessed that if he had been in business before politics, he would have handled such matters with more care." McGovern even went as far as to express the (liberal) heresy that there was truth in Calvin Coolidge's dictum: "the business of America is business."

In British Columbia, known until recently as the "Left Coast" of Canada, we suffered through some ten years of a "McGovernist" type government made up of leaders who, for the most part, had very little experience with business. Their lack of education in marketplace reality was expensive for the people of the province. Like McGovern, they believed they could create a better economic reality through more laws, higher taxes, and stiffer regulations. The result: a stagnant economy and people leaving.

The marketplace teaches people to effectively use scarce resources to serve and please other people; the better a person is at serving the needs of others, the more he is rewarded. These same requirements of service are not so readily reinforced by a career in urban planning, social work, union leadership, or public employment.

Recently our company found ourselves coordinating a project with, of all people, a former provincial Premier, a man once supportive of, and dependent on, the "union vote" but now working for a private company. I'm not certain if he had a "McGovern rebirth" but we did note an apparent change of perspective. Our part of this project was hampered by resistance from the unionized work force at the factory. When informed of the problem, the Premier-turned-businessman had some, shall we say, "unconventional" adjectives to share with us about the unions.

But alas, it seems that Mr. McGovern's enlightenment was only temporary. In a 2002 article in Harper's he seems to have forgotten that business even exists. "Virtually every step forward in our history," he writes, "has been a liberal initiative taken over conservative opposition: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, rural electrification, the establishment of a minimum wage, etc." In his latest musings, it seems that the accomplishments of private citizens aren't even worth a mention in relation to the wonderful accomplishments of government. As Fulford writes, McGovern "takes pride in the creation of the minimum wage by government, but doesn't seem interested in whatever it was that caused wages to be paid in the first place."

Proverbs tells us that if a wise man is rebuked, it is strength to his bones. But when a fool is rebuked—loosely translated—it's like water off a duck's back. A fool is like a dog that returns to his vomit. As Fulford sums up McGovern: "He suffered under the system he had helped create, apologized for it—and then forgot precisely what he had learned."

Return to Volume 9, Number 1.