Government not a savior
Acommon political postulate is we get the government we deserve. More contemporary pundits have modified it to also contend that we get the politicians we deserve.
Both may be true regarding government and politics, but for daily liv- ing, a back-to-basics adaptation might be that we deserve the consequences of our choices.
That runs counter to an emerging but flawed notion that government should somehow save us from our bad decisions.
A number of social maladies are getting worse, not better, despite the fact that the U.S. is an exceedingly wealthy country and a true land of immense opportunity with countless safety nets for the needy.
We have universal compulsory K-12 education, and more higher education institutions than any other nation in the world. More than half of our $4 trillion federal budget is devoted to funding entitlement programs that protect income security and provide health insurance.
But in a free country, the government cannot make good life choices for people. For whatever reasons— and there are a lot of diverging opinions about those—Americans today are making far worse choices en masse than their predecessors about things that weaken the fabric of society, which in turn weaken the structure and functionality of self-government.
Poverty is often blamed for poor choices, and poverty often isn’t within a person’s control. The true poverty rate in America, however, is near an all-time low in terms of total material well-being.
Officially, the government reports a relatively static poverty rate above 10 percent over the past half-century. But independent researchers who analyzed poverty metrics and indicators over time have determined that the actual poverty rate is less than 3 percent today, much lower than the “official” rate of about 11 percent. That’s because Census Bureau data fail to factor in government benefits received by families, such as Medicaid, food stamps and earned income tax credits.
Poor choices that lead predictably to bad outcomes abound in all classes of American social strata. It’s arguable that large swaths of our national citizenry suffer from a bad-decision-making pandemic. We have rights out the wazoo, but responsibility is in pitifully short supply.
The direct reason drug overdoses hit a record high last year has to do with the unregulated black-market supply and tainted pills, but the underlying cause is the fact that way too many Americans are choosing to use drugs.
Children born to low-income unwed mothers can portend a life of hardship, and yet while contraceptive resources are ubiquitous, that statistic remains persistently high in America. It’s been roughly 40 percent of all births since 2007. As recently as 1980, fewer than one in five unmarried women gave birth.
For anyone with health insurance, there is no cost-sharing for contraception. And while uninsured Americans face some out-of-pocket costs for contraception, those are minuscule against the costs of raising a child. Perhaps poor math scores in our schools nationwide may help to explain that disconnect in calculation and choice.
More and more, the landscape of America resembles an enigmatic situation in which we have an overachieving government but an underachieving population.
Our government offers us more than almost any other, but we fare poorly at converting that privilege and opportunity into personal and social accomplishment.
The U.S. is the highest health-cares-pending country in the world by a large measure. But we are far from being the healthiest. Our obesity rate is not only a national embarrassment, but also the source of chronic health problems.
The U.S. spends more on K-12 education than almost every other country. But our students aren’t the most learned.
In numerous U.S. cities, where spending on public schools is highest, juvenile and adult citizens turn toward violent criminality at rates that mirror the worst countries in the world.
The U.S. leads all nations in incarceration rate, which is a reflection of criminal misbehavior, and which lands us slightly ahead of countries like El Salvador and Cuba.
It’s difficult to understand or explain how a country like the U.S., which is a top 20 nation in quality-of-life rankings, must put lawbreaking citizens behind bars at a higher rate than much less developed countries like El Salvador and Cuba. On the quality-of-life list by the United Nations Human Development Index, for example, Cuba ranks 76th and El Salvador ranks 117th out of 178 countries.
The greatest thing Alexis de Tocqueville never said was, “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” Despite its popular misattribution to the French philosopher, the quote is a frequent bipartisan favorite. It alludes to the founders’ steadfast conviction that self-government requires a virtuous public, or it fails.
Our constitutional government has done its part. We the American people enjoy liberty, luxury and life opportunities that billions of others on this Earth will never know, and can never even dream of.
It’s time we did ours. We all must take more individual responsibility for reversing the bad-decision trends and creating a “virtuous public.”
That’s the one thing government cannot give us.