Today and Tomorrow > Today and Tomorrow > On Self Reliance in This Age
While no one will grudge relief in the emergency, the question is bound to be raised in many minds as to how far the government can and should go in assuming the burdens caused by natural and by man-made calamities. The traditional view is, of course, that farmers must take the weather as it comes; relying not at all upon government devices, they become the self-reliant independent stock from which the nation renews its vitality. In this view a paternalistic policy for the farmer is undesirable, not so much because it costs money, but because it softens him as an individual.
There are few persons who would not feel that while there is something in this view, it is infected with a kind of moral blindness. Is the modem American farmer the same kind of farmer around whom there has grown the ideal of complete self-reliance? The traditional view is an ancient one based upon the experience of farmers working their own land for their own needs and for a neighboring community. But the wheat farmer in the Dakotas and Kansas and Nebraska does not live that kind of life. He produces for a world market and he supplies his own needs out of a world market. He is no longer even approximately self-sufficient. Can he then be expected to be wholly self-reliant?
In earlier days if his crop was bad, he suffered and accepted his lot. But today if his crop is bad, his competitor in another region makes a big profit. In earlier days, because he supplied his principal needs at home or in the neighborhood, his standard of life was relatively independent of the consequences of political and economic policies. Today his real income fluctuates spectacularly due to causes which he cannot control by his own prudence, thrift, or industry.
These are the underlying reasons why we now recognize that to protect the farmer against great natural calamities or economic convulsions is a social duty. If he is to be self-reliant, he must be more or less self-sufficient; in so far as he is not, he must either be led back to self-sufficiency or insured against those forces of nature and of society which self-reliance alone cannot deal with.
The difficult aspect of the matter is to know where to draw the line and then to have the political courage to draw it. The farmer, being only human, will expect more protection than society can afford or than he is really entitled to have. But the rule which ought to govern in these affairs is reasonably clear, however hard it may be to apply it in many particular cases. Taking into consideration its resources in the light of its obligations to other groups in the nation, society ought to attempt to insure men against those risks which a reasonably prudent man cannot be expected to avert or to deal with single-handed...
If the virtues and values of individualism and self-reliance are to be preserved, we must not put upon the individual person burdens that are greater than he can by self-reliance carry. This is the surest way to kill individualism: by making it intolerable. In the misery of the past few years the individual burden has been greater than individuals could carry. That is why the very word "individualism," though it is the name of a noble conception of life, has suddenly fallen into such disrepute. To restore men's faith in it, and ail that it means in the preservation of liberty and of the free growth of the human spirit, individualism has to be made safe for reasonably prudent men.
For that reason it can be said that those who are laboring to distribute justly the social risks of our immensely complicated society are the true defenders of individual liberty against the diseases of paternalism and the dangers of tyranny.