“When men are employ’d, they are best content’d.”

–Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1771.

“Work, work, work, is the main thing.”

–Abraham Lincoln, Letter to John M. Brockman, September 25, 1860.

In the year 1607, exactly four centuries ago this year, John Smith boldly articulated one of the core principles of what would become the American way of life. Addressing a group of gentlemen who refused to work–they fancied themselves gentlemen, after all–Smith clearly and unapologetically echoed words once written by Saint Paul to the Christian community in Thessalonia: “If you do not work, you will not eat.” This was a new world, and in the new world, success would not be a product of birthright, entitlement, or exploitation. Success would be a direct product of ingenuity, determination, and above all else, hard, honest work.

America has since risen to become the richest, most powerful country in the world. Its status owes much to a longstanding tradition that values the tremendous capacity of individuals to accomplish great things. Our nation’s amazing contributions to science, industry, finance, and medicine were not the product of government initiative and bureaucratic control. They came from the genius and labor of individual men and women–many of whom, like Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller, started with practically nothing. The American Dream is not a rhetorical trick. It is the concrete realization of values and principle that have drawn the best and the brightest from the world over to our shores.

Americans have long recognized that wealth and prosperity are not fixed and static, limited only to that which can be consumed, traded, stolen, inherited, or redistributed. Rather, wealth and prosperity hold the potential – with hard work, determination, and risk taking – for still greater wealth and prosperity.

To value the work ethic is to value the best within each of us and to value the desire of individuals to put their talents to productive use. It is to demand that government provide its citizens the freedom and means to pursue their own happiness and not to take this right – and responsibility – away from them. It is to value a society that incentivizes rather than discourages hard work, and rewards rather than punishes creativity, talent, and effort. A work ethic is exactly that: a work ethic. It is a moral code that holds up individual talents and economic success as badges of pride, and not as sources of guilt. It recognizes the intrinsic moral good that comes from an individual who has used his or her gifts to the utmost. The phrase “pursuit of happiness” comes from the Scottish Enlightenment and refers to virtue and wisdom. Happiness is not something to which we are entitled but something which every man and woman must earn by their own merit and hard work.

The difference between fighting for a bigger pie and fighting for different pieces of the same pie must be recognized as the critical question of values that it is. Economic growth is more than an accounting metric or a datum at the bottom of a chart. It is the long term goal of a nation that believes all citizens who work hard and work smart can share in the fruits of prosperity. It is the understanding that poverty cannot be fought effectively by constricting success and redistributing wealth. Such measures only serve to choke overall growth and simply encourage the rich to hire lawyers to find more creative ways to defend their wealth. The politics of envy and jealousy believes wealth is static and that one person’s success comes at another’s expense. The idea of growing a bigger pie blasts this model entirely apart. As Americans, we recognize that the way to close the income gap is not to pull the top down but to pull the bottom up.

When politicians promise to “fairly allocate wealth in society”, what this really means is that the implicit threat of physical coercion, rather than the virtue of free enterprise, will determine the flow of resources. From the very start of American civilization, a core American principle has not been to seize the wealth of the richest members of society; it has been to liberate the wealth creating potential of all citizens.

If we as Americans are truly committed to the value of a strong work ethic and the pursuit of happiness, we should reject the redistributionist impulse. Redistribution, quite simply, does not work. It does not create wealth. It does not create jobs, or businesses, or opportunities. If we are serious about fighting poverty, as we must, the only option is to encourage the baking of bigger pies. We must center our efforts on revitalizing a set of values and principles that expects and rewards the best from people. We must construct a framework of free enterprise that honors and rewards hard work.

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