A few thoughts on Personal Responsibility

Perhaps more than any other single quality or value, we Americans have lost our sense of personal responsibility.

From the beginning, personal responsibility was a cornerstone of our nation. The daring and hardy souls who first populated this continent (and this group includes Native Americans, though they are not the primary focus of this essay) came here well aware that they were venturing into the unknown and that there was no "safety net" to bail them out when things went badly. They embodied personal responsibility, which, coupled with a spirit of community and voluntary charity, enabled them to survive the almost unimaginable harshness the virgin continent dealt them.

The founding fathers chose self-rule and personal responsibility over the protection of the King, knowing full well that many would perish as a result of their choice. They established a new nation, with what is arguably the finest Constitution ever penned, based largely on the idea of personal responsibility - what else is liberty, after all? If you are free to make your own choices, you must also be free to fail, and willing to accept the consequences of that failure. Never did they envision Social Security or welfare programs, government bailouts, farming subsidies, or any of the thousands of other protections from failure that our government offers and we, by and large, gratefully accept.

For the last century our country has crept ever closer to becoming a nanny state. Both major political parties have led the charge, Franklin D. Roosevelt's odious New Deal vastly accelerated the demise of freedom at the hands of the Democrats, while Republicans contributed most recently with the abominable Medicare drug program. In the last six months, the creep has become a sprint.

This was not a nation founded on the idea of handouts. It was a nation which was intended to give man maximum freedom - with maximum freedom comes maximum risk. The philosophy of the United States of America could be summed up quite succinctly: Here you will have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of your personal labor, or the agony of your personal apathy.

This is a land where anything is possible, or used to be. Millions of immigrants have come here over the centuries, many millions more have wished they could, attracted not by handouts or promises of security, but by a guarantee of opportunity - nothing more. We have risen to be the one great superpower on the planet because of our freedom and the magnificent ability that liberty has to bring out the very best in men. Given the opportunity to enrich their own and their families' lives through their hard work and ingenuity, Americans have proven to be extraordinarily brilliant and talented. Given the makeup of our populace, coming from every nation, every ethical and religious background in existence, our superiority is not genetic. We have no physical or mental advantage that is lacking in the rest of the world. What we have is freedom, and that has made all the difference.

Somewhere along the way many of us lost sight of this difference. When the carrot of Social Security was dangled, we merrily munched away. We thought of it as a great gift of the government, not as an infringement on our liberties, which is exactly what it is, and will increasingly be in the coming years, as Washington "fixes" it. The percentage has risen over the years, as has the eligibility age - it was initially a 2% deduction from the first $3,000 in earnings, and has risen to 12.4% of all wages up to 241% of the national average wage. The full retirement age is now 67 years for those born after 1959.

As an example, suppose an individual paid the current rate from age 16 to 67, and earned, over his lifetime, an average of $50,000 a year. He would pay in a total of $316,200 over his career. The current (2008) average benefit payment per retired individual is $12,948 a year. To break even, Joe Citizen has to live to be 91.4 years old - and that's just to get his money back, with no interest for having it confiscated for up to 51 years! How much better could Joe have done had he been allowed to keep his own money? Even if he put it in a savings account, he would have acquired substantial interest over those years. And if he failed to save it? If he lacked personal responsibility, he would starve in his old age, or live off the goodness of his family or friends. But Joe is not allowed to make that choice. The government made the choice for Joe, long before he was born.

Our government is intruding ever more into every aspect of our lives. We are apparently not competent to make decisions for ourselves, and to accept the responsibility for those decisions. Instead, the all-knowing bureaucrats in D.C. are making more of them for us every day. They have decided that we are incapable of understanding that we will one day be old, and incapable of earning a living. They have decided that we must be forced to provide for our own future through mandatory payments to a Social Security system that only they are competent enough to manage. But, in case you weren't paying attention, they are not competent.

The Social Security system is failing. In a few years, it will be bankrupt. The bureaucrats talk of "fixing" it, by lowering the amounts paid, raising the percentages deducted, the income threshholds from which it is deducted, and the age at which we can begin to reclaim that which was stolen from us. They condemn a "private option" in no uncertain terms, ostensibly for our protection, but in reality because then we would be assuming personal responsibility for our own future and might learn that we are better at taking care of ourselves than they, and their entire house of cards might begin to crumble. So instead we will pay more into a system - an irrevocably flawed system - then we can ever begin to recoup. This is nothing more than federally sanctioned theft.

If they really wanted to fix the system, they would develop a plan to phase it out - stop requiring payments from workers and gradually reduce the benefits paid to younger workers until no payments are made or expected. That would promote personal responsibility, liberty and self reliance, while drastically shrinking government control over our lives. Obviously, that idea will never occur to anyone in Washington.

This is but one small example of the problems we face due to the lack of personal responsibility in our country today. I will address others. It is an enormous, and growing problem for our nation, and one which we must confront before we are stripped of our liberties entirely.