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Leaky boats sink. Leaky boats skippered by stupid captains sink faster.
Stats affirm the leaky state of America’s boat. Half our workforce is living paycheck to paycheck. Food stamp recipients have gone from 26 million in 2007 to 45 million today. In 1965, one-in-50 Americans was on Medicaid. Now it’s one-in-6. Baby-boomers are racing toward retirement, but less than 25% are remotely prepared. Though new jobs develop, most come with low wages. We’ve added 30 million people since the millennium, but fewer are working now than then. Credit card debt is 8 times what it was 30 years ago.
Though a pleasant target, the rich aren’t making us poor. Yes, it’s true that paycheck ratios for executives and workers has risen from 30 to 1 in 1950 to 300 to 1 today. Those numbers reveal fraud, greed, and slumbering over-sight, not the source of our decline. Crony capitalism, political patronage, and corrupt taxation and monetary policies are temporarily propping up the privileged. A sinking boat eventually claims all decks.
The numbers best marking our slide are written in Chinese and Sanskrit. You can hire a factory worker for less than a dollar an hour in China and India and a world full of other countries. When we exchanged an honest free market, personal responsibility, and production dedications for the fantasies of fair trade, socialism, and consumption, we stomped big holes in our ship.
In truth the middleclass has been fading for decades. Putting mama to work hid the decline. Two is better than one when you’re trying to accumulate TV’s, automobiles, and other toys. Not so good when you’re trying to nurture children and a healthy society.
Robbing our more productive members is a false solution. They pull us all up. Besides, the world’s prosperity potentials are unlimited if we’re dedicated to contributing. Conversely, the misery potentials are unlimited if we’re dedicated to taking. Winston Churchill, that great captain of the twentieth century, said it best, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
No matter what our reckless culture does, there’ll always be opportunities. Conservative thinkers celebrate life, embrace the freedom to stretch personal potentials, and swim for islands of sanity in today’s sea of chaos. Entitlement thinking and bemoaning a leaky rescue boat simply adds another victim to the list.
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