The Conservative Political Action Conference, known to all of us as CPAC, is a time to talk.
Don’t get me wrong: Talking about the right things, to the right people, is good. We need to discuss the issues of the day, discuss how to address them. We need to build alliances and relationships.
But right now, America needs more than talk; our nation needs to be governed. The American people largely voted for President Trump because they want America to function again. This year’s CPAC attendees would do well to remember why they’re there: Namely, to help form and lead a political bloc that gets good things done.
That means focusing on the areas where change can be felt, and where change will make the most impact. One of those areas is economic opportunity.
Most Americans don’t consider themselves to be wealthy. While the American per-capita wealth and income rank us high globally, income growth increasingly favors the elite. Those who already have money are acquiring more money, faster.
But one of the promises of America is that hard work, talent and determination will help you build wealth, no matter where you start out. It is — or was — a rational economy, one that makes sense to the people who exist within it.
It’s an economic milieu where impoverished citizens could make enough money to send their children to college, where the lower and middle classes had every reason to dream of climbing upward socially and economically. Our Declaration of Independence itself is rumored to have originally been written to assert our rights to “life, liberty and [the pursuit of] property.”
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At the very least, early assertions of American colonial rights use this language. Property and wealth are not accidental to the American dream, nor are they accidental to human happiness. We need policies that make upward mobility more attainable, not less attainable. We need a rational economy. We need economic opportunity for all, not just for some.
Sound economic policies are sound cultural policies. Sound economic policies support families, support businesses, support churches. They support the old, the weak, the young, the impoverished and the downcast, because they allow Americans to pursue their own happiness along rational and intelligible lines.
It’s time to take the government’s boot off the neck of small businesses. Make markets free again. Unleash the fabled American entrepreneur: Let Americans work, make, sell, buy, share, give and obtain freely once again, according to their best judgments.
The hard, unseen work of normal Americans is the engine that drives our nation’s greatness. It’s what gives life to the smallest towns and meaning to the largest ones. It feeds the hungry, ministers to the sick, nurses the elderly, trains the young and uplifts the world with its produce.
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children,” goes a little line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton.
The extraordinary power of the most unremarkable American family ought to make it a central political priority.
And that isn’t because each family is somehow secretly remarkable, or because they comprise an identity that needs protection. It’s because they, together with their countless peers, daily carry out the lives that make our great nation possible.
We don’t need more talk. We don’t need more regulation. We need more freedom to work, freedom to earn and freedom in the pursuit of happiness.
Timothy Head is the president and CEO of Unify.US and the former executive director at the Faith & Freedom Coalition.
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