Whom Do You Trust?

Whom do you trust? As I think about the issues of the day, I believe much of it boils down to the answer to this one question: Whom do you trust? Do you think I mean some person, party, or organization—conservative or liberal, Democratic or Republican, Christian or multicultural or something else? Could it be your wife, your dad, your president, or pastor? Surely we can trust our best friend, our Mom or grandma, or at least the best person we know! Can we? Most of us have assumed we could trust teachers, civic leaders, professional colleagues, and certain highly regarded institutions like the courts. Experience can be a painful teacher when abruptly we find that someone or something we trusted has let us down or disappointed us. Here is the lesson I have learned: Although I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I don’t really trust anyone except God[1].

I am not a cynic. By temperament, I am an optimist, and I tend to expect things to work out and assume, at the outset anyway, that people will be honest and trustworthy. Of course, things can turn out badly, and decent people sometimes disappoint, betray, or abandon us. So, to put it simply, I hope for the best but am prepared for the worst. I generally believe that most people, except the very worst sort, mean well, even if I disagree with them. Yet, I do disagree with a rather large number of such well-meaning people. Some are family, and some are friends. I didn’t always agree with my favorite professor and advisor. One teacher offered a valuable guideline when he wrote N. E. T. M. A. on the board; it stands for “Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything.” In other words, a person’s say-so is not enough; I need to confirm truth-claims independently—check sources, hear from eyewitnesses, and verify scientifically. I have learned that anyone can be wrong, mistaken, misleading, or even dishonest. I have discovered that I can misunderstand even the most honest people, and they can misunderstand me. So I hope for the best but cover my hindermost parts.

For example, I have learned that it’s always a good idea to “put it in writing.” If I were to go into business with my very dearest and oldest friend, I should still work out a partnership agreement[2]. Putting things in writing protects important relationships. An older couple with families and assets who marry are wise to work out and put in writing their intentions to keep their families from ending up in a messy probate battle. Even in a less complicated situation, a properly prepared will reduces the likelihood of a fight among siblings. I learned this lesson the hard way; my whole life and career were turned upside down when I simply trusted good people. A written agreement most likely would have maintained our mutual respect and kept me from a miserable setback in work and income. Ironically, I already knew better, but I made major changes in my life without the most basic contract to protect my interests. I paid the price! Furthermore, with 20-20 hindsight, I later realized that they didn’t break faith or their word but rather had a different understanding of our arrangement, a difference of perception that a written contract would, hopefully, have exposed[3].

How does the issue of trust apply to bigger issues? Whom do you trust? Do you trust the government? Are you suspicious of big business? Your answer, whether you’ve given it much thought or not, will indicate whether you are a socialist of some kind or a capitalist, on a scale somewhere from communist to libertarian. At the one extreme and, frankly, well to the middle, people trust government. They accept centralization, redistributive taxes, big social programs, government protectionism, and heavy regulation. For them, the future depends on the right people in charge so that the government properly takes care of everything.

I reject that approach, in part, because huge organizations cannot do anything efficiently. Everything they do, however well intended, regardless of who manages them, will cost more and accomplish less. Inefficiency and ineffectiveness are reason enough; even worse, an exponential growth of government puts ever-increasing power in the hands of a few people. I don’t trust anyone enough to give them that kind of power willingly. Do you? Furthermore, it takes an enormous number of people—we call them bureaucrats—to run a mammoth organization. The more people involved, the more difficult it is to supervise and hold them accountable. Incredible authority rests in faceless functionaries who often remain, even though leadership changes many times. I can’t put my faith in them, can you?

Many of us have been slowly indoctrinated into accepting socialism. Since the winners write the history, and since liberalists (liberal is not an accurate work to use[4]) since FDR have proclaimed, reported, and taught that only the government can do what needs to be done, progressive socialism is the message of educators, textbooks, and the media. Never mind that the constitution strictly limited the powers of the federal government to a few areas that only a central government can do, such as provide for security, wage war, make treaties, and settle interstate conflicts of interest. Today, many think that only the federal government can provide for medical care, educate children, or help the poor, even at the expense of the given duties of the national government, such as defense. They believe that the central government must protect us from big business, natural disaster, and even ourselves. They confiscate huge sums of money, a large percentage of which disappears into the equally huge bureaucracy necessary to operate numerous social programs from Washington. I don’t trust anyone to be in charge of all that, and I don’t think this is, even remotely, an effective way to get things done. Do you?

By the way, I don’t trust big business, Republicans, conservatives, or Christians with this or any other substantial exercise of power. That’s why I’m a free-market capitalist and virtually a libertarian, because there are a few things I do trust, in a manner of speaking. I trust a capitalist to work hard to make a profit. Assuming he doesn’t ignore basic laws regarding theft or keeping contracts, I expect him to respond to his market because it is to his advantage to do so. Profit motivates him to “care” about what people want. If they don’t want it, he can’t sell it. I have read some really bizarre notions from socialist-oriented economists, but the fall of the Soviet Union pretty well proves them all wrong. Much of the bad stuff in business today comes straight from the government’s interference through an anti-business bias, over-regulation, using taxes to control business (helping some and hurting others), and greedy over-taxation that drives business abroad. Even then, not all the bad stuff in business is actually bad stuff, but stuff that politicians, bureaucrats, pro-government activists, socialist-minded media, and secular progressive educators tell us is bad stuff, and we believe them. Making a profit is good because it motivates people in business to do all sorts of goods things that make life good, providing us a virtually unlimited variety of goods and services as well as ever-increasing innovation. The more that government tries to run and control everything the less variety of goods and services people have. You can trust socialist governments to stifle prosperity, creativity, and freedom. That’s how things were in the U.S.S.R., still are today in places like Cuba and China, and will be in the West including the United States, if we allow it to continue in the direction it is going[5].

I trust an individual with true freedom to look out for his own interests better than anyone else, including and especially the government. To say the government cares for any individual is absurd. The government is an enormous assemblage of people who know few of us. First, to the extent possible, they will look out for themselves and their friends. Since we elect a handful of people who supposedly run the government (although the larger the bureaucracy the more likely the bureaucrats run things!), they look out for us only to the extent that is necessary to get our votes. At that, they only need to create the perception that they’re looking out for us. Even the most committed and honest are severely limited in what they can do through the leviathan that is our federal government or through comparably monstrous state governments. State and local government, schools, medical facilities, and virtually every other kind of organization and activity is encumbered with government interference, added costs, loss of money due to high taxes, and tons (literally) of paperwork. Furthermore, the shift to centralized government and all that comes with it has largely disenfranchised most of the population, promising to care for them, removing most incentives to work hard, save, create, or even care for themselves, and turning huge classes of people into victims who expect the government to redress their grievances, real or otherwise (and most are otherwise!).

Speaking of which, I have a healthy mistrust of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and their respective organizations. However, my caution is substantively different regarding healthcare as compared to the justice or educations systems. Medicine involves a huge body of knowledge that, like science in general, is growing rapidly. Doctors and other medical personnel endure an arduous process to prepare for practice. Yet many physiological processes remain a mystery, conditions are not fully understood, and diseases elude a cure. Not everyone agrees what is best, and even if they do, no one, not even a good doctor, is perfect. I never simply trust my doctor. I ask questions, learn all I can about the problems that influence or endanger my health, and get second opinions for the serious diagnoses. I get books and research my concerns on the Internet. If possible, I will have someone assertive looking after my care if or when I can’t. Doctors and nurses, health care providers, drug companies, and insurers make the best health system in the world possible, but it cannot guarantee health or healing, which ultimately still rests on God and the creation He designed. Government control cannot make it better, and the government’s interference has already damaged it and increased the costs. Lawyers and the courts are also driving costs up while driving good people, businesses, and researchers away, to the loss of everyone![6]

Law is an equally complex field, and becoming a lawyer is also demanding. However, what lawyers do is often not a life or death matter. The American justice system provides two basic and necessary functions—enforcement of law and recovery of damages. The purpose of both is to protect people, and unfortunately both are so encumbered that they fail to protect and often damage people instead. Exaggerated protections for the accused allow known criminals to escape justice. The concept of a fair and speedy trial has disappeared into a system tied up with endless appeals. The inability to use solid evidence due to technicalities allows plea-bargaining to scare the innocent into confessing while allowing the guilty to avoid conviction. Perhaps because that’s where the money is, the rights of the criminal often seem to supercede the rights of the victim.

In addition to the failures on the criminal side, the abuse of the civil side of the system is even worse. Forcing dishonest, corrupt, or willfully negligent parties to pay for the harm they do is a good and necessary component of a free society, but litigation is like a cancer that has grown until it threatens the very life of its host, the United States. Lawyers convince juries to require people and businesses to pay large compensatory damages, which is to cover the cost of actual harm done. Then they persuade them to add huge additional punitive damages, which become gigantic amounts that often destroy careers and businesses, while putting over half the prize into the pockets of the lawyers. None of us escape because the survivors increase prices of goods and services, governmental bodies increase taxes to pay, and many just quit, with worthwhile ventures destroyed by the enormous costs or given up as too risky under threat of litigation.

Even the government sues! Sometimes, class action lawsuits are filed on behalf of people who don’t even know they’re involved. A drug company can lose everything after spending millions in research, followed by more years to obtain FDA approval, and then still be sued, not for known side effects, but for a problem that surfaced despite careful study inside and outside of their labs. The problem need not be legitimate; lawyers use the fears and empathy of jurors to win settlements despite clear, contrary, scientific evidence.

On top of all that, lawyers become judges, and judges have come close to taking over the government. Courts have used the Constitution to find rights, plainly not in the document itself. Some judges simply impose their own agenda, overruling voters even when they have expressed their will plainly through a ballot initiative. Having said all that, the system still works many times, and I know there are many good lawyers. Still, I mistrust the legal system and have less of an idea how to protect myself and my interests than I do with doctors and the medical system.

I have slowly come to distrust the public educational system. Over my lifetime teachers have changed from underpaid but highly motivated transmitters of knowledge into overpaid and often ignorant purveyors of political correctness and anti-American ideology. Public schools have become laboratories for faddish educational notions that disparage substantive learning in favor of psychological manipulation and social engineering. The deterioration of student proficiency is a near criminal scandal, well documented and well known. The United States is well on its way to surrendering its leadership and prosperity because our schools are producing illiterate, math incapable graduates, who haven’t learned American history, civics, or economics. Furthermore, the social climate of the schools encourages promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse, disrespect for adults, as well as ignorance. If I were a parent, I wouldn’t let my kid anywhere near a public school, no matter what it cost or what sacrifices I would need to make.

As a citizen, I believe the state of public schools seriously threatens our nation’s future. I have seen this mess, first hand, and I no longer trust any teacher that I don’t know very well. I do trust the system to spend, that is, waste an unbelievable amount of tax revenue, despite clear evidence that the failure is getting worse. I trust politicians to continue to suck up to the teacher unions and their financial support, while they send their own kids to private schools. I trust secular progressive teachers and professors to keep working to indoctrinate their charges to reject the traditional beliefs and values enshrined in our Constitution and still held by a majority of Americans. I wish I could trust teachers; I believe many of them are still good, well-intended people. Some of my own teachers were significant influences in my life and thinking and deep wells of knowledge. At that, I could never put unconditional trust even in such as they were.

Instead, I trust free people, looking our for their own interests, protected by the genius of the constitution, liberated from the burden of too much government and too many taxes, inspired to participate in free market capitalism, properly protected by the legal system, and motivated by the American dream, to make this nation even greater than it has become. I trust that people in other places, who see how it’s done, will replicate it, as a few have already done. Of course, here or abroad, such people will have to work hard to get the government out of their way.

I do not trust activists seeking to turn their particular issue into even more government. Too many seek to use the government’s power when they fail to win their argument in the arena of ideas. If they can’t get the state governments to do it, and even when they do, they go after the federal government. When they can’t accomplish their purpose through the electoral process, they use the courts, replacing the authority of the constitution and the power of the voters with the whims of easily manipulated juries and ideological judges. As a result, more and more aspects of life are controlled, while individual freedom suffers. Most necessary laws were enacted long ago, supported by virtually everyone. Current maneuverings attempt, and often succeed, in imposing the will of a few over the majority. However admirable their objectives seem, the result is loss of liberty and the risk of overt oppression. Such is not hard to imagine if you listen to the rhetoric of extreme feminists, environmentalists, gay rights activists, or, lately, advocates for illegal immigrants or anti-war demonstrators. The “blame America” crowd is frightening, and all of this scares me even more, given the desire of extremist terrorist groups to destroy us, and the blind and foolish among us who disregard or disbelieve the threat. I don’t trust people like them to be in charge. Do you?

I have a healthy distrust of reporters and commentators, talk show hosts, and celebrities who think their fame makes them experts. I give little credence to name-callers, who attack the person instead of making the case for their own ideas; I suspect such people of ignorance or deep dishonesty, which is good cause not to believe them. I have an abiding suspicion of those who criticize and mock people who believe in God or have traditional values and who claim that everything is relative. I doubt them even more when they reveal their own inflexible support of the politically correct agenda of rights. I find little to trust in those who use science to promote their environmentalist, global warming, zero population growth, or organic agendas when they are plainly ignorant of actual scientific principles and methodology. I am similarly dubious of those who misuse mathematics through polls, statistics, and percentages that reveal nothing of the actual data or ideas they manipulate. I’m a smart guy and understand mathematics pretty well, and sometimes they’re just throwing numbers around to manipulate whomever listens. I urge you not to trust them; I don’t!

So, whom do you trust? I urge you to examine and re-evaluate your thinking if it’s the central government, the federal or even the state authorities, or a socialist ideology. Beware of those who advocate social changes that you support because, the next time, they will just as likely attack something that you don’t want to change. Shakespeare wrote, well before the modern era, “Let’s kill the lawyers.” In context, that was an attack on the rule of law; now, it could be a recognition of the damage the lawyers themselves are doing to the rule of law. The United States has been fortunate, so far, in that the voters have been able to maintain a measure of control. Christian ethics have supported the rule of law embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and many good people have led us. Much of the rest of the world has not been so fortunate, and they largely want what we have. I certainly don’t want what they have. Do you? All the more reason to ask the question: Whom do you trust?

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[1] Trusting God offers a person a remarkable degree of peace and freedom in dealing with the vicissitudes of life. Ultimately, I trust the saving power of Jesus’ death and resurrection to assure that I live, now and forever, under the sovereign care of God, forgiven of all my human failings and misdeeds, and blessed with his personal presence and providential direction. The inspiration for American liberty came from people who believed such things despite today’s common and relentless misrepresentations by entertainers, media, educators, and politicians.

However, contrary to their similar misrepresentations, I have no interest in some sort of religious government because I don’t trust Christian people, even those with whom I most closely agree, much more than anyone else. All of us are sinners and equally untrustworthy. I believe we have as much right as anyone to participate in all the privileges of citizenship including free speech. I obviously have little trust in those who misuse the constitution to restrict our religious liberty.

[2] I was working with a partner, without a written agreement, when I began this essay. It was an error in judgment I now regret. Whatever the disappointment, we have only ourselves to blame when our assumptions go wrong.

[3] You can imagine my chagrin when I realized I had, to some extent, walked again into an all too familiar situation!

[4] Liberal means free, but big, centralized governments stifle freedom. True liberals would prefer to reduce laws and regulation in favor of individual liberty. Many who take so-called “liberal” positions frequently refuse to discuss their views honestly or allow others to debate them, using insults and character assassination in place of ideas. They are leftists, socialists, or even communists. Bill O’Reilly calls them secular progressives. Tammy Buce calls them malignant narcissists. Thomas Sowell calls them “the anointed.” Dinesh D’Souza calls them illiberals. Lately, I have taken to calling them “liberalists.”

[5] The 2006 election raised some interesting questions about that direction. One party regarded as conservative succumbed to the temptations of money and power; the other pretended to advocate the conservative values they despise in order to win votes. Openly socialistic, big government doesn’t sell, but few politicians have the virtue to represent honestly what they really intend or to resist its advantages…to themselves!

[6] Educators, administrators, and their unions don’t fit into the discussion of the healthcare system, but they receive a degree of respect and compensation well beyond their self-proclaimed professional expertise, in many cases. Both the medical and legal professions require far more training and mastery of a considerably larger body of knowledge, as everyone knows. Medical and bar exams are strenuous and comprehensive. Teacher certification is anything but! Still operating in the market place, bad doctors and lawyers will lose business; bad teachers get tenure and remain in their classrooms, boring their students, at the least, or harming them by killing their desire to learn, at the worst.

I pick up on this theme in a subsequent post, Whom Do You Trust II.