A Faith-Based Nation (L-O-N-G)

No, this isn’t a religious rant. This has nothing to do with religion in the god sense—it DOES, however, have a lot to do with belief and doing something over and over again.

For decades, certain segments of our society have put blind faith in government in the same way that some put blind faith in a god. Like the so-called “miracles” of loaves and fishes, parting the Red Sea, walking on water, and so forth, our own government is expected to do similar things:

1. Provide for us in sickness and old age.

Much like the old church ways of providing a social safety net in exchange for regular contributions, the government is expected to provide for us in the same manner—we’ve completely given up on the idea of caring for ourselves or other family members through tight-knit family unity.

2. Provide us with access to money.

Not only is the government supposed to manage the country’s money through budgets and allocations, they’re supposed to grant YOU access to money that isn’t yours, through an elaborate set of income and debt requirements, as well as judge the propensity to pay back any monies borrowed. In order to equalize the system for greater access, the lending standards will be lowered with a blind eye to risk.

3. Provide us with access to power.

In order to receive our power so desperately sought after, the government has given us voting rights and enabled voters to contact their local, state, and federal representatives. This power can be wielded in many ways—from personal gain for the politician to personal gain for a particular voter or group of voters through the use of a middleman, or lobbyist.

4. Provide us with social programs designed to subsidize basic living needs.

For those who can’t or won’t seek out gainful employment or otherwise provide for themselves, certain programs have been created to assist in providing basic living needs (short-term or long-term) but stringent qualifications must be met. To ensure greater access to these programs, once again the qualification standards will be lowered.

5. Provide us with a means of carrying out economic transactions.

The standard and universally-recognized U.S. dollar and coins serve to aid us in conducting transactions, and is always accepted at face value at all times.

Many of us put our enduring faith in government to provide these things (and much more) just as we would a god. Just as there is nothing to back up what we may think a god can provide for us, there isn’t much to the government’s actions either—in fact, there are more unintended consequences and deleterious effects to them than many of us know about because they’re subtle.

For example, let’s take item #1—sure, the government provides for those who are sick and old, but it comes at a price to the rest of us through Social Security and Medicare taxes. When people reach the grand old age of 65 (Social Security has three different age levels for access), all of a sudden they’re deemed too old or too poor to fend for themselves, and qualify for these programs. For many who didn’t manage to save enough for retirement and future healthcare needs, or make adequate estate provisions, this boon turns out to be a shackle of dependence, limiting recipients from earning enough income on their own to survive. These taxes alone are enough to consider stopping working, and recessions mean less tax revenues for these programs (at a time when more and more will come to depend on it as the only source of income). Slower population growth also renders this system unsustainable, so why do so many turn to these programs as a sole means of support? If stringent requirements are in place for the opposite end of the dependence spectrum (young age and welfare), why not install them in THIS end too?

Item #2—As with almost every other kind of government-public provision (with the exception of Social Security and Medicare), stringent rules exist for qualifying for money through a credit scoring system, which means not everybody is going to qualify. When standards are lowered, more people come into the system, adding risk to borrowing, and eventually, too much risk and not enough cushion causes the system to topple (as witnessed in today’s credit crunch and mortgage debacle). This is the unintended consequence of allowing more people into the system—not everybody can win. As a result, the government has had to step in and subsidize the bad risk at great cost to the taxpayers, and now fewer people have access to the system…as it should have been all along.

Item #3—Through the voting booth, phone lines, and internet, we have access to government power, but what does it cost us? If we want something specific done, it takes money and votes, and we usually possess one or the other, but seldom sufficient quantities of both at once. For those who do, it’s their lucky day, and they wield great influence over swaying the power to their ends. The rest of us just vote, and this had led to the government buying our votes with various enticements, such as subsidy access, loophole creation, or regulation relaxation in exchange for continued support (through money and/or votes). The cycle continues until it alone consumes a politician’s business cycle: get elected, raise funds, get re-elected, and so on), and this is an unintended consequence of our power system.

Item #4—The subsidy programs developed in the 1930’s to help ward off the effects of the Depression only served to usher in a different kind of depression—economic and class blight. Eligibility was so relaxed for these programs that they became systemic for generations of many families, and they continued teaching their children how to work the system to it’s utmost expediency, ignoring the fact that the money had to come from somewhere—the rest of us taxpayers. The purpose of these programs was to pay individuals and families to stay out of the work force, yet make poverty so uncomfortable it would discourage use of the programs. The unintended consequence was that the tax code, lack of education, and lack of character breeding among recipient families made it more profitable to be expedient and avoid work at all costs, thus the elaborate ways formed to game the programs. Race relations were melding into more of a class relations problem, and have largely remained that way.

Item #5—Our dollars may be accepted at face value, but we no longer get our money’s worth in goods and services. Globalization and currency markets have helped see to the destruction of our money’s worth, and producers and retailers have jacked up prices to offset this devaluation. Government’s incessant printing and borrowing haven’t helped either, but they have to get money from somewhere—the taxpayer is almost tapped out, and will only get poorer and poorer through price increases and tax increases until he/she is bled dry. The shrinking overall population of our country means that the money presses will run night and day trying to cover all the obligations created ¾ of a century ago.

With all this going on, we still seem to have full faith and credit in our money, just like the dollar bills say. But do we really know what that means? It means “this paper is worth the number printed on it because I believe it is, and I willingly accept it at face value even though nothing backs it up.”

It’s obviously not the end of the faith-based administration you though it was going to be when Bush left office—only the type of faith has changed. We’ve been a faith-based nation in some form since we were founded, and it will never end.