As Obama touts more government spending, he brings up more shovel ready road construction. Forgetting that only 6% of the stimulus bill actually went to those kinds of jobs, many people, including my best friend, are caught up in the notion that we need infrastructure and buy the parliament jesters' puppet theater for the somnambulent public. Yes, that's true that we need roads. However, we cannot take care of our needs as long as politicians lavishly layer on pork projects for all the things they want to do first.
This weekend, Americans will probably spend a lot of money they don't have to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. In that way, they will be a lot like our politicians. Harry Reid thinks we're all smelly tourists. Obama thinks we're lazy. They aren't spending their own money; they're spending ours. See, the problem in government is that people tend to think that tax money is someone else's, especially people who pay no net taxes. Exacerbating the trend, we have 'investment ideas' like real estate that encourage you to use Other People's Money. If you haven't got much invested, losing hurts a lot less.
Life is full of tough choices. After we become adults, we realize we have bills to pay and obligations to meet, ad infinitum. Where we once valued people for their carefree spontaneity, we then respect people who have their act together. Then we foolishly vote for people who tell us what we want to hear. The time has come to reevaluate our priorities. I see very few politicians lay out their "Top Ten" let alone rack and stack them in any kind of order. Only then, rather than redistribute wealth, they can focus on those other options. We must face the fact that we will never have enough money to do everything everyone wants at every time.
Like Friederick Bastiat wrote, this is just a form of legalized plunder. It compels people, sometimes contrary to their conscience, to fund things with which they disagree and which are distal to them in space and in time without their knowledge or consent. Why should Catholics have to pay for federally funded abortions? Why should Mainiacs or Floridians have to pay for road repair in Nevada? How does the Federal DoT know what roads in Nevada need work? There are probably politicians in Nevada who don't know where SR446 is let alone ever drove on it. We will always need to repair roads and expand our infrastructure. That always has been true and always will be. It is something that will never be finished and will always require money. Politicians use it as a tear-jerker.
What we need is a government that prioritizes spending and acts according to the constitutional constraints. Just as you will, hopefully, reign in your spending on Black Friday to what you can afford, government needs to prioritize its spending and take care of its obligations first and then the things on its list it can actually afford. See, you and I can't just go print money, and if nobody will loan us any because we don't pay it back, we're sunk.
Life's full of tough choices. Our modern world has become like our gas stations- self-serve. The new morality says, do what you like, rather than do what you ought. Political posts are positions of responsibility, and we hear a lot about rights and powers and beneficience without much talk of the attendent responsibilities. There is a good reason why responsibility isn't given away like candy at Halloween. Responsibility is something that must be taken and taken seriously.
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