“There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

This phrase is basic to Christian character. That it is also so widely known — or was, when I was growing up — is a positive factor in the American character.

I do not choose here to pile onto Bill Bennett because of his gambling. I intend to pile onto him because of his status as a pusher of addictive substances.

I admit that I never liked the man’s style, and I never approved of his decision to become Humanities Czar and then Drug Czar. In my view, the most productive thing he ever did in his public career was to keep the late Mel Bradford from becoming the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mel weakened for a time, wanting to distribute some of the government’s boodle to a better class of scholars. In other words, he briefly dreamed of spreading the addiction to money that had been confiscated by the Federal government. Bennett got the job, so he became the pusher.

Trying to do good things with government money is like trying to improve the public’s health by providing government-funded medical inspections for harlots. The latter policy increases demand for their services. It spreads the sin by reducing the risk. It is the equivalent of providing free needles to heroin addicts, so that they will not get or spread AIDS. Public health bureaucrats apparently do not want any of the addicts to conclude, “I really should stop doing this. I might die of AIDS.” So, the bureaucrats subsidize the lifestyle of addiction, thereby destroying lives, as economists say, at the margin. Oh, well. Those people were marginal anyway.

I contend that this outlook toward addiction is the inevitable result of every government-funded project to make people good. It is the chief perversion of civil government. It is the heart, mind, and soul of the messianic state.

Under Bush, Sr., Bennett was appointed head of the newly created Office of National Drug Control Policy. In 1989 and 1990, he served as the official spokesman for government programs that eventually dispersed $44 billion on anti-drug efforts during Bush’s term. This was in addition to $39 billion a year in state and local spending. Bennett devised a new policy: go after drug users. This filled America’s prisons with people other than drug lords.

Bennett later headed up something called the National Commission of Civic Renewal. You can understand his present public relations problem, not to mention that organization’s problem. Imagine the organization’s logo as a slot machine. The three bars are on jackpot: Renewal, Renewal, Renewal.

Bennett is an addict in every sense of the word. As in the case of drug addiction, there are no victims of gambler’s addiction, i.e., victims in the sense of victims of violence. But there are surely victims in both varieties of addiction. He has wasted his children’s inheritance, just as drug addicts do every day. But, unlike drug addicts, he will not be sent to jail. There is no Office of National Gambling Control Policy.

His personal addiction, being legal in the cities where he publicly but quietly exercised his civil liberties, did not cost the U.S. government billions of dollars in a fruitless attempt to wipe it out. For years, nobody paid any attention to the pudgy man in front of the slot machine who transferred a fortune to the entertainment-addiction segment of American industry.

Now his $50,000 per speech fees will dry up. He will therefore be forced to dry out. The question is: Will he be able to stay on the wagon?

He should have been lecturing for free at sessions of Gambler’s Anonymous. “Hi, I’m Bill B., and I’m an addict.” But he did not. This is because the essence of all the 12-step programs is humility and the willingness to accept personal responsibility for one’s actions. You have to have both for these programs to work. Bennett has always lacked the first characteristic. This loss did not begin at the slots in Las Vegas. It began no later than the day he accepted the post known as the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he planned to make American scholarship better with confiscated money.

Decades ago, someone asked Ludwig von Mises what he would do if the government gave him full authority to re-structure the American economy. His one-word answer was profound: “Resign.” As a utilitarian, unlike Murray Rothbard, Mises would not have admitted that this answer was profoundly moral, but it was.

BEATING THE NUMBERS

The drug addict’s addiction begins with this: an unwillingness to accept the world as it is, which includes the possibility of reform. Instead of adopting a life of thrift, hard work, and generosity as the proper response to a sin-cursed world, the person ingests drugs that alter his perception of reality. He then becomes part of the problem. He says he likes to get high. It’s entertainment, he says. But he indulges his habit at the expense of a personal self-help program of serving consumers through greater productivity and serving the poor or the afflicted through generosity. Instead, he transfers the means of individual and social improvement — his money — to drug pushers. Then he squanders his only irreplaceable resource: his time.

Where do people first learn this destructive behavior? Usually in tax-funded schools. The drug emporium of every neighborhood in America is the local public high school.

Bennett extended his career as a high-profile bureaucrat when Reagan made him Secretary of Education. There, he oversaw the dispersion of billions of dollars to the drug emporiums. He justified this as a way to improve American education. He looked at the numbers — declining test scores and rising drug addiction, which paralleled rising grants from the Federal government — and concluded: “I can beat the numbers. I’m Bill Bennett.”

He made the same decision under Bush when he became the Drug Czar. He thought he could beat the numbers.

Bennett says he enjoys the experience of gambling. He is no doubt telling the truth. He plays the slots — the preferred game of high-risk losers who refuse to face statistics. He knows the numbers, but he does not care.

This has been the story of his entire public career. He looks at the numbers, which support a conclusion of “do nothing,” and he decides to Do Something Big.

Bill Bennett has spent his career refusing to resign on principle from offices and personal practices that cry out: “Quit!” He is too proud to resign. He has always believed that he, through force of will, could beat the numbers. This belief is the essence of every form of addiction. Overcoming it is what every 12-step program of sobriety begins with.

It is worth noting that Alcoholics Anonymous, the original 12-step program, will not accept funding from any outside source, especially the government. Bill Wilson, or “Bill W.,” understood from the beginning that outside funding would do two things: (1) transfer control over the program to outsiders; (2) reduce the personal responsibility of the members, whose main failings were pride and irresponsibility.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

I am told by the son of an alcoholic who got sober in the mid-1950’s, and who has stayed sober because of Alcoholics Anonymous, that an alcoholic experiences a moment of truth when he recognizes what he has become. This may happen only once. If he ignores it, he is likely to drink himself to death.

His father’s moment of truth took place on a camping trip. He went out in his truck with his dog for the weekend. He drank all weekend. The morning when he was to come home, he called to the dog to get into the truck. The dog refused. At that point, the man knew what he had become. He could no longer even fool his dog. He drove home, called AA, and joined. He has been sober ever since.

In the fine film, The Days of Wine and Roses, Jack Lemmon has his moment of truth while standing in front of a store window. He sees his own reflection in the glass, and initially wonders, “Who is that rummy?” This leads to his recovery. His wife never has her moment of truth in the film. She does not recover.

William Bennett has now experienced his moment of truth. The whole world knows what he is: an addict who has gambled away his children’s inheritance. He says he will stop gambling. I pray that he will. But I have my doubts. His entire demeanor is the same.

He said at first that he had broken even. This was the same old line: Bill Bennett not only could beat the numbers, he did beat the numbers.

Then his story changed. He has not hurt anyone, he insisted. He has paid his bills on time. In short, he invoked the “victimless crime” excuse — the excuse that he has always denied to peaceful drug addicts. The man remains in denial, unwilling to face what he has done, both in his career and his personal life. His own religion tells him otherwise:

A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just (Proverbs 13:22).

He has squandered his grandchildren’s inheritance, as surely as some cocaine addict has.

He thinks he can break this addiction by force of will. Again, Bennett is saying, “I can beat the numbers.” Gamblers Anonymous members have a lower recovery rate than AA members, or so the unofficial grapevine says. (These two organizations wisely do not let sociologists do their surveys.) This failure rate probably has something to do with the alcoholic’s realization that his addiction will kill him. The gambler may fear retaliation by the bookie or the mob, but he figures they will not kill him. They want him back. They want him to pay his debts. Dead men don’t pay. Similarly, the bartender is not going to kill the alcoholic. But the booze will.

A LESSON FOR US ALL

Addiction comes in many forms. One man’s addiction is another man’s evening of fun after a long day at work. The second man had better not think, “I’m immune.” He may be immune to the first man’s addiction. He is not immune to all addictions. The correct response to the other person’s addiction is this: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

This is why 12-step programs begin with a declaration, or creed. This creed is posted on AA websites, but more to my point here, on the Web page of AA’s parallel organization for teenage children of alcoholics. The children know the confession well, and are aware of its healing power, before they reach adulthood. In this sense, they have an advantage over the rest of us.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Anyone who sneers at either Bennett or this confession has fallen into the trap of pride that Bennett fell into.

Sadly, this same attitude has lured the vast majority of politicians, who have sought election based on the promise of making bad people good through the instrument of political coercion. Political power has been the drug of choice among most reformers for two centuries. They are pushers, for they addict voters to the same drug.

They think they can beat the numbers: annual budget deficits, long-term Social Security deficits, the price effects of the expansion of money, etc., etc. We now have a nation of addicts who have adopted this view of external reality. Every time a recession arrives, they return to the bottle — higher taxes, more government spending, more fiat money — for the bottle helps them in their lifetime goal: to avoid facing what they have become, and what they have done to their children’s inheritance.

Voters should not sneer at Bill Bennett’s addiction to gambling and its result: the squandering of his children’s inheritance. Instead, they should look more carefully at Social Security’s statistics. Then they should join Voters Anonymous. “Hi. I’m John Q., and I’m an addict. I think voting can make other people good. I need help.”