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Life lessons can apply to nation
Published 7:19am Wednesday, February 3, 2010Too much of anything – even a good thing – can kill you.
It is a lesson that we never seem to learn, in part because the danger and damage from good things can be so insidious. The woman who drinks herself to death doesn’t plan on that outcome. And she’s certainly right that “one more drink” won’t in and of itself be the cause of dissolution, disease and death.
But somewhere in that long chain of drinks – or food or spending or fast driving, whatever a person’s poison may be – there’s a watershed after which it is all too much.
This is certainly true of individuals. I wonder whether it might also be true of nations.
The United States is a great nation, and perhaps the greatest not only today but in all of history. The personal freedoms, standard of living, safety and democratic government that Americans enjoy are without equal on this earth. It is possible to argue that things could be a lot better, yet when it comes to a comparison our country beats all challengers.
Many of those good things have, however, not come without a cost, which takes the form of a gigantic – and growing – government deficit. The news this week is that the coming year’s federal budget will run a deficit equal to 11 percent of the entire nation’s economic output. That deficit has to be filled with something and what it will partly be filled with is loans, in one form or another, from places like China.
Indeed, the United States is apparently now in a position where, according to news accounts, China of all places needs to snoop into our budget to see if we’re a safe investment.
Maybe it is time to take a good, hard look at whether we can afford to do everything we’ve been doing.
For instance, can we really afford to spend billions of dollars each year policing Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo? Can we afford to be the ones holding the line between South Korea and its northern neighbor? Is there really much benefit – to us — in being the world’s policeman?
Can we afford to be a society where whose motto is “safety first?” The belief that every aspect of our lives needs to be nearly risk-free is extraordinarily expensive – from the costs of the world’s most over-used court system to the societal costs of expecting that “the government” will make sue everything is OK.
Can we afford to have the government be the ultimate provider of jobs, of security, of retirement funds? In an ideal world, a perfect government might eliminate poverty and suffering. Or, in a slightly less perfect world, it might spend so much attempting to be all things to all people that China ends up owning us. What would happen then to our liberties and our lifestyles?
In a global economy, can we afford to be so expensive a place to do business that no one will do business here?
We can undoubtedly buy ourselves good things for a few more years – perhaps many more years – without worrying about any of the above questions. But at some point, we may well cross the watershed and find it nearly impossible to climb out the other side.
Most likely we haven’t yet reached that watershed moment. But no one – absolutely no one – knows how far ahead that moment lies. The smart moving is to start planning like it will be tomorrow.
