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The Fourth of July has hopefully served as a useful reminder that America is a pretty nice place, and certainly worth preserving. Most Americans, however, seem to think that we're heading in the wrong direction. So what, if anything, needs to change?
My personal feeling is that the root of most of America's problems is the inability to appreciate the simple fact that you can't have everything you want. We live in an age of near limitless opportunity, it seems. There's a sense that it's almost "un-American" to constrain consumption. The "American Way" is to buy a sprawling house in the suburbs with a three car garage, complete with the cars to fill it and all the other lifestyle trappings to accompany it. We get what we want, and we get it now.
I see something of a similar sort going on a collective level in the halls of government, and neither party is free of blame. It's not that health care, social security, or whatever else isn't an inherently valuable goal; the problem is that we've dissociated the price of these goods, such that we don't really seem to appreciate how much it costs. As long as "somebody else" is paying for these things (and lately, "somebody else" is the richest percentages), there will be little to curb the spending appetite of government.
I feel that the single most important thing that would point America back in the right direction would be to re-embrace the concept, on an individual as well as a collective level, that there are some things which we just can't afford.
We perhaps have shied away from this notion as suggesting weakness, but never in the history of the world has fiscal responsibility been so interpreted. In Rome, the opposite was true; thrift and prudence was considered the foundation of society, and luxuria, emblematic of decadent and extravagant living, was a disease, the tragic flaw that could undermine the very existence of the Republic. There's an argument to be made that the influence of luxuria from the East was indeed one of the main contributing causes to the fall of both Rome and (to some extent) Greece.
Addressing this problem in its modern form can be tricky, of course. It would not be wise to limit access or use of credit, which can so often allow for fiscally responsible decisions in the first place. How else to go about it . . . I'm not sure. And who knows-- maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction.
My personal feeling is that the root of most of America's problems is the inability to appreciate the simple fact that you can't have everything you want. We live in an age of near limitless opportunity, it seems. There's a sense that it's almost "un-American" to constrain consumption. The "American Way" is to buy a sprawling house in the suburbs with a three car garage, complete with the cars to fill it and all the other lifestyle trappings to accompany it. We get what we want, and we get it now.
I see something of a similar sort going on a collective level in the halls of government, and neither party is free of blame. It's not that health care, social security, or whatever else isn't an inherently valuable goal; the problem is that we've dissociated the price of these goods, such that we don't really seem to appreciate how much it costs. As long as "somebody else" is paying for these things (and lately, "somebody else" is the richest percentages), there will be little to curb the spending appetite of government.
I feel that the single most important thing that would point America back in the right direction would be to re-embrace the concept, on an individual as well as a collective level, that there are some things which we just can't afford.
We perhaps have shied away from this notion as suggesting weakness, but never in the history of the world has fiscal responsibility been so interpreted. In Rome, the opposite was true; thrift and prudence was considered the foundation of society, and luxuria, emblematic of decadent and extravagant living, was a disease, the tragic flaw that could undermine the very existence of the Republic. There's an argument to be made that the influence of luxuria from the East was indeed one of the main contributing causes to the fall of both Rome and (to some extent) Greece.
Addressing this problem in its modern form can be tricky, of course. It would not be wise to limit access or use of credit, which can so often allow for fiscally responsible decisions in the first place. How else to go about it . . . I'm not sure. And who knows-- maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction.
) the Book of Mormon. First, good old King Mosiah's advice on representative government:
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