<strong><em>"It's not that we will have equal  outcome. In fact, the American dream is that those who work harder and  those who merit it will have unequal outcomes, that they will gain more  of whatever the American dream is."</em></strong>
<strong>-- Sen. RAND PAUL</strong>

Actually, that isn't it at all, and I would be willing to bet that even John Calvin --from whom the idea behind this came -- would understand that. Even if he was the one who codified and stated the idea that success in life was all about working hard and that God loved those most who worked the hardest.

[caption id="attachment_1231" align="alignright" width="300" caption="It&#39;s not everyone&#39;s dream."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/American_Dream_Just_add_money.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1231" title="American_Dream_Just_add_money" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/American_Dream_Just_add_money-300x213.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="213" /></a>[/caption]

The American Dream?

It's not really about "more" at all. When English philosopher John Locke -- a Calvinist himself for much of his life -- wrote of the rights of man, he said that they were life, liberty and property. Thomas Jefferson rejected that, at least in part, when he said in 1776 that men were endowed by their Creator with the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Many of us have forgotten how radical that idea was, especially the part where Jefferson argued that all men were created equal. That's true even if he only meant <em>men</em> men and <em>white</em> men. It's important to remember that much of the civilized world in 1776 still believed that kings, czars and their ilk had a divine right to rule. The idea that a poor peasant could be created by God as the equal of a king was extremely radical for the time.

That's what makes our recent obesiance toward the wealthy so ironic. Sixty years ago, after the end of World War II, there was a wonderful statement that summed up Americans so well. I have used it before on this site, so please bear with me for using it again.

<em>"An Englishman walks the world as if he owns it. An American walks the world as if he didn't give a damn who owns it."</em>

When did we lose that? When did we become so obseqious? When did we become bitter and mean instead of cocky and friendly?

It's hard to believe that everything changed so much in less than half a century. Just half a century ago we had a progressive tax system, a government that was the envy of the world for what it could accomplish and a people who looked to the future and really expected it to be better for their children than it was for them.

We balanced our budgets, both nationally and at home. We had jobs that may not have been our dream jobs, but at least we didn't stay awake at night worrying how long we would have those jobs.

Maybe the most ironic thing of all is how we came to mistrust our government. In the years after the war, we rebuilt Europe through the Marshall Plan, an action Winston Churchill called the most unselfish act by any great power in history. At home we built the interstate highway system, a task so massive it could never have been done by private industry.

We sent a generation of men to college on the G.I. Bill and we ended American apartheid with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

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Yet within a generation we had a significant number of people among us who swore that government couldn't do anything as well as private business, and people we had called "civil servants" now were being called "bureaucrats" and worse.

And by the way, Ronald Reagan never said that government wasn't the solution, it was the problem. The quote by the amiable old actor was from his <a title="Reagan's 1981 inaugural address" href="http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres61.html">1981 inaugural</a>. Here's what he said about the sustained inflation that had been plaguing the country for more than a decade:

<em>"The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several  decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will  go away. They will go away because we, as Americans, have the capacity  now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to  preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.</em>

<em>"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem."</em>

That one quote, so often distorted and misquoted, has fueled an attack on our government by 30 years of conservatives. In fact, many of them have become more Catholic than the Pope when it comes to Reagan. The 40th president may have been the classic example of style trumping substance, but he did after all want to propose to Mikhail Gorbachev that both the U.S. and the USSR eliminate <em>all</em> their nuclear weapons.

Sounds like a pretty good American Dream to me.

I may be overly optimistic after all we have been through, but I honestly still believe in the goodness of average people in this country. I don't think most Americans dream of being millionaires or billionaires, and I'm pretty sure most folks wouldn't want to screw their co-workers or their neighbors if that's what it took to get ahead. I think most people are basically moral, at least to the point where they want to earn their success and not steal it.

It's on July 4th that we seem to remember our ideals a little more than we do on other days of the year. We didn't come to America in the 17th and 18th centuries because of the right to bear arms or for a free-market economic system. We came here to speak freely, to worship freely.

In 1800, Jefferson wrote that "I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

That's a really big part of what our country is all about. I would argue with Jefferson as my bulwark against Rand Paul that when he speaks of those work harder gaining "more of whatever the American Dream is," he's dead wrong.

The American Dream has never been about "more."

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