Raise taxes. Cut taxes. Spend more. Spend less. These are the basic ideas in Washington for how to revive the middle class and restore American prosperity. As everybody knows, Republican and Democratic ideas basically cancel each other out, which is why Washington doesn’t accomplish much these days.

Are you expecting a breakthrough? Neither am I. That’s why I explored ways ordinary Americans can restore their own prosperity—and stop waiting for a feckless government to do it—in my new book Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom.

There’s a lot, it turns out, that all of us can do to safeguard our own fortunes and enhance our prospects, as Aaron Task, Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo Finance, and I discuss in the video above. We’ve grown accustomed, however, to outsourcing prosperity. We rely on tax breaks to give us an edge and government programs to bail us out if we get into trouble. We count on employers to give us raises and lay off somebody else (not me!) if they have to trim the fat. We blame politicians or fat-cat CEOs or anybody, really, other than ourselves if something goes wrong and we fall behind.

The virtue of self-reliance

Here’s a major national problem that politicians rarely talk about: We’ve lost the knack for self-reliance, a core American trait that has been integral to the rise of the world’s only superpower and has helped America rebound from disaster. We revere the Founding Fathers but fail to emulate the self-sufficiency they practiced. The 40 years from 1960 to 2000 were an unprecedented epoch of wealth creation in America, the era that produced the vast middle class we think of today as the backbone of the nation. But widespread prosperity also bred complacency that is manifesting itself now in a chronic shortfall of economic resilience—at all socioeconomic levels, in every industry and part of the country.

Pleas for greater self-reliance are sometimes used as code for shrinking government and cutting back aid to the needy. That’s not the kind of tough love I propose. Government has become a huge, self-perpetuating industry that will function in its fractious, maddening way no matter what you or I do. If we spent as much time and effort building personal self-reliance as we do complaining about government, it would probably amount to a potent economic stimulus program dwarfing anything policymakers could dream up.

Here’s how individuals can build their own economic self-reliance. Start by doing a “dependency audit” evaluating all the institutions you’re dependent on. Some you can’t do much about — you get power from the local utility, for instance, and it makes no sense to generate your own power. You may discover, however, that you’re dependent on borrowed money to finance everyday things, including many you don't really need. If so, you’ve outsourced your personal prosperity to lenders that regard you as nothing more than an account number in a computer system.