What Obama Didn’t Say

America is not about common blood, or race, or ethnic background or religion. America is about an idea, and that idea is freedom.

Of course the term is omnipresent in our politics, but the meaning has always been contested. Every major transformation in our history, from the Civil War, to the New Deal, to the Reagan Revolution, was a fight over the meaning of freedom.

In recent years, however, the idea of freedom was distorted beyond recognition. Freedom was redefined as a singular crusade for smaller government and market efficiency—so-called free-market liberalism. Now we are sifting through a vast economic wreckage for answers, and it is no coincidence that we are also searching anew for a more perfect meaning of freedom.

The soaring title of President Obama's inaugural theme, "A New Birth of Freedom," is exactly what we have needed.In his address, the president implored the nation "to carry forth that great gift of freedom and deliver it safely to future generations." Yet, as regards the economy, he gave us scant foundation by which to do so, saying very little about what his economic agenda means for our freedom. As a result, silent on how it furthers freedom in a nation dedicated to that ideal, his economic agenda may be incapable of achieving lasting success.

True, President Obama needed to respond to a gathering economic crisis, and he had to use the Inaugural Address to summon support for vigorous government action to counter it. Yet, that is all the more reason for interpreting the crisis at hand as a crisis of freedom. Free-market theory has wrongly confused freedom with small government, low taxes and minimal regulation. That is not how our Founders, or Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw it. All of them understood that freedom often requires strong governmental intervention into the economy. In their view, today's equation of freedom with unfettered markets helped create the present crisis.

For these great leaders, the economic independence of individuals and the security of that independence lay at the center of the meaning of freedom. If individuals were unable to provide a dignified and secure living through their efforts, or if they could not get a fair return from their work when they did more and produced more, or if they came under the will of another person to make a living without having other readily available alternatives to support themselves, then they were neither truly independent nor truly free. It was the appropriate role of government to help assure the necessary conditions, utilizing ways that neither tax nor regulate more than would be required to attain the appropriate end.

Among the Founding Fathers, James Madison called for intervention by government to lift impoverished individuals to a condition of comfort even if that required policies involving both taxation and redistribution of wealth. The republic will survive, he argued, only by "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort." Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both saw the need for broadly shared wealth, in the form of landownership, as a condition of equal liberty. Jefferson proposed that the government grant ownership of50 acres of land to every family, that is, a share of productive resources then sufficient to secure their independence. John Adams' prescription for preserving liberty was the same: "make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society…So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates."

The Founders also understood the need for public investment. Alongside his ringing defense of limited government, Jefferson supported governmental involvement in an enormous range of public actions to encourage the economy's and the nation's expansion. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, to take just one example, was possibly the single largest public investment in American history, securing the land base that made American agriculture the most productive in the world by the end of the century. In combination with roads, canals, schools and other projects, Jefferson believed that such actions by government would assure all Americans a future of boundless economic opportunities for a thousand generations to come.

The 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth is just weeks away, and President Obama's inauguration theme of "a new birth of freedom" was meant to honor Lincoln's legacy. Lincoln's view of freedom went beyond ending slavery. During his second year in office, in 1862, he signed the Homestead Act, which implemented Jefferson's idea by granting a 160-acre parcel to every American willing to work the land. Here, again,freedom went hand in hand with government helping to establish the conditions for economic independence. Like Jefferson, too, Lincoln supported numerous governmental projects designed to widen opportunity still further.

Franklin Roosevelt acted in the same historic tradition. "Liberty requires opportunity to make a decent living according to the standard of the day, a living which gives a man not only enough to live by, but something to live for," he declared. "True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." The New Deal's job-creation programs, minimum wage, housing assistance, Social Security and labor-bargaining regulations all attempted to adapt the traditional idea of freedom to the new economic conditions of a propertyless, wage-earning majority.

The idea that freedom requires adequate opportunity for economic independence aligns with the way most of us still think about freedom on a personal level. We don't consider someone as essentially free to work, for example, if there is no work; similarly, if there are 100 people but only 80 spaces to fill, we don't think that everybody is really free to get a space. Our intuitive idea of freedom is expressed in the quintessential promise of the American Dream: that enough opportunity will be available for all who work hardto gain a decent living through their effortand advance further as they accomplish more. To the degree that individuals lack such opportunity, they are not fully free.

The economy of the past four decades has systematically violated this high principle. Yes, we have had a sharply rising gross national product much of the time. All the same, real wages for the average working American have remained nearly frozen despite an 80 percent rise in workers' productivity. In an increasingly underregulated and de-unionized market, the substantial wage growth that rising productivity should have generated went almost entirely to the top 5 percent instead. In addition, large numbers today have inadequate health-care coverage, unaffordable education bills and underfunded retirements.

To contend withstagnating wages, families have had to put second and third earners into the market, run through their savings and go ever more deeply into debt. Families became overstretched from work, savings dropped to zero and debt of all kinds—consumer, business, trade and governmental—soared. No economy can survive those conditions forever. Ours ultimately crashed.

Certainly the leading Founders, Lincoln and FDR would recognize our current problems as a crisis of freedom, a crisis resulting from the emasculated meaning of the nation's pre-eminent value. Today's emptier market view of freedom not only helped create the present crisis by promoting unfettered markets, it also worked to restrict our political will to take the steps necessary to prevent it.

Or so it seems. In his Inaugural Address, President Obama spoke of the economic agenda we need. By itself, however,the need for such an agenda does not generate the will to enact it, let alone guarantee that it will survive for very long. It will not be easy to avoid an eventual return to the era just past. Only by restoring the historic ideal of freedom can we unite around the economic task at hand and gain the clarity of purpose necessary to keep us united far down that path.