I’m Rick Santorum. I’m a former United States Senator from the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
What you’re seeing now is because we have a seen a breakdown of trust in the system. The free market system isn’t working. It isn’t working because people no longer trust that what companies say is going on within their company is actually real and when that happens, people don’t lend money to them, people don’t do business with them, people don’t trust that the relationships that they have established are going to be fulfilled in a way that the people for a certain will. And so I think instead of making the point that the free market system doesn’t promote moral character by seeing all these scandals and seeing the breakdown of the free market system. What you’re seeing is that the reason for the breakdown is because people have in fact abused that trust. That is not to say that everybody involved in the free market system is going to be an honorable actor, is going to be moral but what it shows is that if they aren’t, now do they fail and do they not succeed but the system fails and so the lesson learned in my opinion out of this whole scandal is that businesses and our society needs to focus a lot more on these basic principles of honesty and integrity and trust to make sure that the free market system continues to work well for us.
It’s a great hope. I’ll never forget after the events of 9/11, one of the things President Bush said, “We got to spend money.” Here, we are at a time we’re being attacked and I criticized him at the time for saying that but is that what really this is about? Yes, we want to keep our economy going and certainly that was the president’s point but it was also a time that we have to look at sacrifice and service and we’re engaged in a struggle here and the struggle in this case was the war. The struggle now we’re dealing with is trying to right the economy. But there’s a larger struggle here and that’s the every person’s individual struggle with who are they and what are they going to be and how do they fit into this picture. I think we need leaders who are frankly focused that life is about struggle, that we’ve sort of lost the virtue of struggle. And if you look back in your own life and you look back in the history of country collectively, the times where America has been in its finest and where individuals are at its finest is in fact during those very difficult times. That’s when you build character. That’s when you find out the meddle of the people and what this country really is all about. It’s not in the good times. The good times contend to be the most immoral times and can be the most decadent times. And in times we look back in sort of blush a little bit. It was certainly the time of excess.
Our founders in our founding document, a phrase which hopefully most Americans know that we hold these truths to be self evident and we can go, “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator.” There’s certainly equal rights. That’s a phrase that I was taught when I was a young kid. I don’t know how often it is thought in the schools today. I would hope it would taught and would be dissected and understood but the concept there was that you had people who believed in truth and in fact you could discern truth, that there was in fact a right and wrong and that the person that laid out what was right and wrong was a deity, it was God. That there was a god, there was a creator and that we are part of his creation and as a result we have a moral obligation that he has dictated for.
That was the basic foundation of America. It was a Judeo-Christian ethic, it was Judeo-Christian reason. It was a merger of faith and reason that gave us that we could not only have truth revealed to us divinely but in fact we could reason our way to truth and if it’s the truth, by the way, it turns out to be the same, whether it’s divinely revealed or reason.
I wrote a book three or four years called “It takes a family” and spend most of that book talking about the founder’s vision and because I think this is a country that is still based on that incredible unique vision of our founders that has had such a huge impact on the world. We need to continue to remember that the freedom that we sought was not a freedom that our founder saw as licensed. The freedom to do whatever you wanted to do, your respect of its impact on someone else. If you have said that to Adams or Franklin or Jefferson, they would have looked at as if you were from I don’t know where because that concept was foreign. That was not what freedom. Freedom was the ability to be able to do what you ought to do without government telling you to do something that you know in your heart and soul wrong.
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