National Resource Development: Priority #1 - OpEd

Given the media-driven consumer-oriented society that rules in America today, it is crucial for all Americans to understand the personal and societal effects of their every day spending. As our society is transformed from the societal safety net of the New Deal to one emphasizing personal responsibility, saving for the long term is crucial. We are inundated on a daily basis with images, jingles, and slogans telling us to spend our money on one item or service as opposed to another or at one place or another. The temptation to buy on impulse is a constant threat to personal economic welfare. For children particularly, it is crucial that they be taught the values and responsibilities that will enable them to thrive in our self reliant society.

Many young people today are entering their first jobs with virtually no awareness of the need for a lifetime savings plan, the importance of spending wisely. They haven’t a clue how to do either with any confidence they are doing it right. The opportunity to establish good habits of money management- stewardship, if you will- is critical at this time in their lives. Without it, many give in to the temptation to blow their first paychecks on the newest sneakers or stereo equipment instead of putting even a small portion away for a rainy day or the family college fund.

Assuring the right outcome to this economic fork in the road should be a societal mandate of paramount importance. The young people of this nation are its future. They are our greatest national resource. With growing worries over the job market and whether Social Security will still be there 30 years down the road, the time is ripe for instilling in pre-teens and teenagers the importance of responsibility for their own economic success. Parents should teach their children how to spend wisely by encouraging them to buy what they need rather than what they want. Teachers should also reinforce good economic behavior by their students. We should also see that basic information is supplemented as they progress through their teen years so by the time they hit twenty, the variety of investment opportunities available is at least generally understood...

Here in South Carolina we are lucky to have the South Carolina Council on Economic Education lodged at the Darla Moore School of Business in Columbia. The Council, in its words is “a non profit business education partnership dedicated to providing teachers with continuing education in economics and personal finance”. Its website, (sceconomics.org) is filled with economic education tools for kids from primary grades through high school that make learning the tools to navigate life’s economic challenges fun and relatively painless. While the Council has been here for thirty years, we are neglecting to use it to full potential. Too often this aspect of education is ignored.

Our kids are “over programmed” we are told, and this subject is one that quite often is left for life to teach. We can and ought to do better. Public schools should be required to demonstrate that their students can not only read and write, but they understand what is necessary in the way of prudent use of their earnings to survive and thrive in today’s fast changing world economy. From my perspective, I sure would like them to understand as well that each of them has a responsibility to utilize at least some of their prudently retained earnings to help those institutions in their community dependent on public charitable support. Our future is not only dependent on their economic sophistication but their moral maturity

In one particularly effective example of how to do this, parents, teachers, and young people joined together in Franklin County, Colorado several years ago to hold an event with the United Way and the National Endowment for Financial Education, Young Americans Education Foundation, and various local community groups to educate young people on personal finance, entrepreneurship, and career planning. The groups focused on educators and students during an economic education expo by staging a hands-on learning curriculum, animated financial concepts, business training, a high school financial planning seminar, and other events. The expo was held in response to local public outcry to give young people tools necessary, while they are in school, to make good, responsible financial decisions throughout their adult lives.

Events such as these succeed on two levels: they instill the ethics of personal financial responsibility in young people, and they build a sense of community in a city or town. Through a whole community banding together, adolescents will get the message that personal economic responsibility is crucial to their security and happiness both for the future and in the short term.

If such an event is not possible for individual parents and teachers, these adults should still work to instill the values of responsibility, frugality, and saving and investing into young people. Without these values, teens and pre-teens are at risk in our dynamic economy of not having the skills and personal habits to succeed.

The future of America depends on responsible individuals who spend and invest wisely.

Charleston is not so large that we wouldn’t directly benefit by creating our own program, and we are fortunate to have two fine public business schools here to help lead the way. The Citadel, its mentor association and the College of Charleston are excellent institutions dedicated to the welfare of our area who should undertake this effort as a joint project. Working with The Council on Economic Education, our Foundation and, The Board of Education, I would suggest we look at developing a pilot project this year to leverage our resources and create our own local program that will merge both moral and economic educational growth.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel and a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury April 26, 2006. Page 16.

Churchill's Peace (II) - OpEd

Following my column on Churchill’s Peace, one of my readers sent me an article sited as the view of the Arab world by an Arab. Haim Hariri is described as Chair of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and past president of the Weizmann Institute of Education. His comments were delivered before the international advisory board of an unidentified trans national corporation.

Having read a dozen or more such offerings in the past year or so, I can tell you his views are numbered among the more moderate and least cataclysmic of those I have come across. All confirm we are in the early stages of a world war. All express optimism we will eventually overcome the challenge to civilization posed by the terrorists, but all also say we have many rough days ahead of us and imply the battle if won will require us to change as well.

Dr. Hariri first notes that Israel and its intrusion into God’s cradle of civilization has little if anything to do with the roiling storms tossing the Muslim world. He notes many examples from Iraq, Algeria and Afghanistan to prove his point and concludes by saying that... “[t]he root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional and would be so even if the Israelis weren’t part of the picture”. He describes the Arab world as consisting of 22 nations, with 300 million people covering an area larger than the U.S. or Europe. He notes their wealth in energy resources and suggests that one measure of their dysfunction is that with all this going for them, they only collectively produce one half of the GDP for California and concludes… “That almost everybody in the region blames this situation on The United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism, on Christianity, and on anyone and anything except themselves.” He indicts the “vast silent majority” of “decent honest good people” in the region as enablers of those who have brought this plague on themselves and the rest of the world.

Dr. Hariri points to 4 main pillars of the world conflict: The first pillar he states is suicide-murder which creates terror well beyond the total numbers for such deaths. Any comparison with deaths from AIDS in Africa or all the deaths in Russia or Bosnia as a result of the war in Chechnya would dwarf those caused by murder suicide. But one 9/11 incident or any similar scenario shocks and frightens by its sheer unpredictability. The impossibility of effectively countering these threats while maintaining anything like free movement of our citizens creates a level of continuing terror previously unknown. It also forces us to consider changes to the ordering of our society that appear Hobsonian in what they force us to sacrifice in cherished freedoms.

The second element is lies. “..The level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications… have reached new heights in the region” says Hariri. I would add that the Western press has become a handmaiden to the deliberate distortions by giving those distortions and the ensuing round of additional falsifications that occur far more respect than they deserve. By failing to project a Western humanistic perspective in its reporting, our free press is failing to follow the precedent of most of the media in prior wars not to give aid and comfort to those who would destroy us. Thank heavens for email from our service personnel which counters the falsehoods and is for the most part supportive of our mission as well as their role in it.

The third element is money in obscene amounts that circulates to support munitions, travel, terrorists, hideouts, logistics, the layered support of planners, commanders, preachers and others all serving as a “terror infrastructure”. Again we need to decide that if we are at “war, we will use all the tools at our disposal to starve it of the resources used to wage its crimes against humanity.

Faced with this situation the Administration has had to scramble to reorder staffing and resource priorities for a war of ideas, a war that could in the view of one senior military commander very well last thirty years, and it has to devise a strategy that allows our society to continue to advance while satisfying the public that the very real losses continuing to be suffered are necessary, that we will win because we are right in the long run and that there is no less painful approach to make it all just go away.

The last pillar of the Muslim war is the breaking of all laws both moral and state ordained. Nothing other than the total victory of their medieval view of society is acceptable to them. They offer no quarter and view us as ripe for the taking because of our soft and fuzzy humanistic values. Reason is not to prevail in their system, only their rigid view of the requirements of the often conflicting dictates of their faith will do.

While I don’t have the answer to make it all go away, I have made the point to one member of the President’s national security team that the public is prepared to sacrifice so long as they understand what is at stake for them. Under close questioning, the response is that the President is firm in his resolve, is speaking out regularly laying out the case and is not receiving the media coverage necessary to reach our citizens with his cogent message. The administration understands that it has a serious communications problem but doesn’t seem to me as if they have any well thought out plan to solve it. Maybe it is the media moguls who need to be called to The White House for a chat on what is at stake and perhaps as well, the administration needs to add some right thinking Democrats to its team to make it clear that at least in this area we must be united. When accepting the reins of responsibility for defending the British Isles, Winston Churchill noted that all he had to offer his fellow citizens was “blood toil tears and sweat…” While our situation is not so dire, it is equally as serious, longer in term and more difficult of resolution. Our leadership is being tested but more importantly each of us is being tested as well, and this is a battle we dare not lose.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury April 13, 2006. Page 16.