You know what else is troubling?
January 27th, 2009
This garbage. Apparently Nancy Pelosi strongly supports the idea of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on birth control as an economic control. I understand the logic. One of the biggest obstacles to wealth is having children before marriage. But it’s not my responsibility to pay for someone else’s bad judgment. Yet this is only the first of many problems with Pelosi’s vision.
While it doesn’t look like it’s going to make it through, the idea of birth control becoming a national economic concern, to be treated with mechanical contraception, as opposed to a personal matter, best dealt with through family and community, is creepy. But it makes sense from a purely economic perspective. The less people are living in a society, the easier it is to allocate a finite amount of resources (it’s funny how this never comes up when liberals discuss illegal immigration). It’s a sign of the times that Americans are abandoning their own alleged principals in an eerily socialistic obsession with material goods (capitalists are preoccupied with property rights; socialists are preoccupied with property).
America is being sucked back into the 1930’s, where economic matters pushed moral concerns out of the public eye. On one hand, this is helpful. The focus on our fragile economy has pushed the left’s moral crusades, most notably environmentalism, far down America’s collective list of concerns. Unfortunately, the same force that finally muffled the earth tones has also degraded the importance Americans place on illegal immigration, crime, and general morality. I don’t think we’re a financial meltdown away from a Chinese “one-child” policy, but given the growing lack of concern with moral issues, it wouldn’t surprise me, either.
Don’t get me wrong, economics matter; even before it was recognized as a school of thought, the allocation of resources has profoundly affected every community that’s inhabited the earth. It’s great that American citizens recognize how important the economy is. But even more fundamental to the well-being of humanity are moral concerns. That this may sound fanatical in the current political climate scares me.
Nevertheless, the argument that morality is more important as economics isn’t a polemical claim. What good are riches if a citizenry isn’t honest, faithful, or even peaceful? What good is a well-run society if it doesn’t respect free will? If a suspension of human dignity is what takes to get the trains running on time, then damn the trains. The Matrix appears to be a fantastically efficient society, but I don’t see humans climbing into pods and plugging themselves into a bioelectric grid.
You might say, “Who cares about things like abortion when unemployment is going up and more families can’t pay their rent? How can morality make my family more secure”? The answer is that it can’t, at least not directly. But if society is willing to disregard moral boundaries in the name of economic security, it’s only a matter of time before it ignores constitutional boundaries as well. A nation wholly preoccupied with wealth won’t be concerned about term limits or whether or not Daddy spends months in jail for undermining El Presidente’s master plan. There’s a reason communist societies aren’t free; communism’s totalistic concern with economic matters leaves little room for anything else.
Just like most Americans, I want the economy to come back to life. I just don’t want see my nation’s moral and political heritage atrophy while we’re all waiting for that to happen.