The Most Seductive Lie In Politics

Personal responsibility.

That used to be something that most Americans believed in. Most Americans still do, but pretty much nobody in our political class does, because the most seductive line in American politics is: “It’s not your fault.”

Here’s why our national debt is out of control, inflation is rampant, and there’s no end in sight.

The Left is fully invested in the idea that every bad decision is the result of societal consequence; the Marxist theory at work. But it is also true that people make decisions. The Left suggests that every decision is in fact a societal or governmental decision. Unfortunately, this has also bled over to the Right.

This sort of attitude, which is that nothing is your fault, has three results.

One: The radical expansion of government. That’s because if you don’t take responsibility for your life, then somebody else has to take responsibility for your life, and the government has to expand, either by subsidizing or bossing you around or both.

We treat the actual normal things the government should be doing as secondary, and the stuff we personally should be doing as the government’s primary functions. This is how you end up with the idiotic take that the government should spend, not on defense, but on whatever the social program of the day is. You end up with financial illiteracy.

When you believe that it’s the government’s job to take care of all your problems, this is what you end up with: that the government should not take care of our national defense, that we should be short on interceptors so that we can spend more on SNAP.

Here’s the reality: Consider all the government’s social programs, with their heavily incentivized private benefits, such as employer-funded healthcare, 401(k) matches, and tax credits. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or the OECD, ranks the United States the number one global spender on social programs. Our net total spending, when you combine the public safety net and private benefits, ranks us number two per capita, behind France.

Two: We start putting focus on the government not doing its core functions and doing all these other things that are not its core functions.

Three: We become worse people because nothing is ever our fault.

Personal responsibility withers; governmental control increases.

It is a very, very short road from  “I have no agency” to “I can take whatever I want from the government because it’s not my fault.”

You want to know why people keep moving party to party, wildly swiveling from side to side? It’s because if people promise you the world, they will come up short. The government cannot make up for the failures of personal decision making. Social institutions wither; personal responsibility withers.

On an individual level, people tend to buy this nonsense because it tells them what they want to hear: It’s not their fault; the government can take care of it. That’s what politicians will say to reassure the people.

But eternal national debt and inflation, the withering of our social institutions and the withering of personal virtue is where this is going.

If you want that, you simply get rid of the basic idea of human nature that the Founding Fathers believed in. The Founding Fathers believed that we all had choices in front of us, good choices and bad choices, and because we all have the capacity for evil and the capacity for good, they said we needed checks and balances and constitutionally protected freedoms because they believed that the capacity for choice was our highest human calling.

That was what mattered more than anything.

Because if you’re not exercising your choice in pursuit of the good, then what are you on this planet for?