Returning to Normal, Part 2
Crises, especially long ones, generally change things. Those changes are either to prevent a crisis from happening again or they could be a learned response to the crisis. We might find people less likely to shake hands or hug in the future. We don’t know yet.
By Larry Craig
Crises, especially long ones, generally change things. Those changes are either to prevent a crisis from happening again or they could be a learned response to the crisis. We might find people less likely to shake hands or hug in the future. We don’t know yet.
The United States is experiencing one of those times, and we need to look at some of the possible changes that could take place and decide beforehand if they are the right thing to do.
One thing you can fully expect and can see developing right now is an expanded role of government in everyday life. We need protection, and who else better to give it than the federal government?
People need guaranteed health insurance, wage security (not necessarily job security), and ready access to essential things, whether toilet paper or medical supplies. We need one consolidated central source of information and decision-making to ensure that all this happens.
Right?
Our country has been around for almost 250 years, and all this yearning for a massive government to protect and take care of us is a new thing in American history.
There are too many questions to try to answer them all in the space allotted here, so we have to go slowly.
In the 1960s, our country made a major shift in public policy. I’m sure experts will attribute that to the Civil Rights movement, which certainly changed a lot of things, but I submit we go back to just before that. I admit it’s hard to identify all the causes for anything, but something else did happen that changed the entire course of our country.
It was in the early 1960s that the Supreme Court banned the Bible and prayer from public schools. This is where the nation shifted from being a Christian nation to being a secular one. And what that did for the nation was shift the public’s consciousness of God as their helper to the government.
Our nation was created on the belief that God gave rights to human beings, rights for things they could do without government intrusion. Remove God from our thinking, and rights become government-given rights. It now becomes the government’s job to take care of you, whereas before people relied on God and their neighbors for that.
Sound farfetched?
Nope. The change has been too dramatic. It can only be explained by a change at the very foundation of our country.
You can get graphs on government spending on the Internet that compare the amount of money our federal government has spent year to year.
Federal spending was flat throughout our history, even during the war years, compared to what it has been since.
Since the 1960s, government spending has been like climbing a mountain after having crossed a flat desert for almost 200 years.
And with the mountain of increased spending, our national debt has increased along with it at pretty much the same pace. There were a few years around the turn of the century when we didn’t add to the national debt, but they were mere blips on an ever-growing mountain of debt.
But there’s more. You can also get graphs of the rate of inflation during these same years, and inflation has been increasing on almost the same trajectory as government spending and debt. So for all the years of our federal government spending trillions of dollars to take care of everybody, the value of our money has been going down at pretty much the same rate.
Furthermore, not only has the value of our money been going down at a rapid rate, we have been paying increasing amounts of money to pay for this debt, currently hundreds of billions of dollars a year, making everything we’re getting from the government more expensive than it would be otherwise. We’re not even paying down the debt. We just borrow money to pay the interest on the debt. Everything costs more when you’re always paying interest on it.
I submit that government spending has been so out of control for so long that it cannot be trusted with new responsibilities that require spending money. When people spend their own money, they try to get the most value for their money. Government spends other people’s money, and it has not shown any restraint in the last 60 years to justify giving it any more responsibility than it has now.
Please visit my blog at poligion1.blogspot.com for articles I have written on politics, culture, and public life.
