Our culture has been shaped by the godless notion that compassion means the abolition of consequences. Addicts should be given a free home and a safe place to kill themselves. Career criminals should either be released, or sequestered away in a resort prison where he can think about what a bad boy he’s been. Corrupt politicians should be allowed to weasel their way out of straight answers and accountability structures. But God will not be mocked, nor can the fixed order of his creation ultimately be undermined.
What would you do if I told you that the most important part of wealth generation was . . . generating wealth? Would you be surprised? Would you look at me like I’d just told you that the wheels on the bus do, in fact, go round and round?
One might hope.
Sadly, we no longer live in times where we can assume general agreement on basic facts. Thus, instead of the time-tested formula for prosperity, otherwise known as labour → wages → reinvestment, we must languish under the auspices of “progressive” math, which looks like labour → taxation → redistribution. Which really just looks like an approaching renaissance of soviet-style living blocks.
One of the results of this new formula rollout has been the steady acceptance of what might be called “bailout culture.” Bailout culture develops when half-dead businesses, organizations, and institutions are supplied with indefinite transfusions of government money. What revived my attention on the topic was recently learning that Ontario has pledged 1.2 billion dollars towards “beleaguered colleges and universities,” but the truth is that most of Canada’s infrastructure has been consuming snowbank-sized quantities of government sugar for decades. Which explains why it’s so inefficient, unproductive, and hard to watch climb the stairs.
Part of the problem is that a hungry state never wants to let go of its vested interests, even when its skin is falling off in sheets. They also know they won’t have to. You see, it doesn’t matter how unproductive your interests are, so long as everyone is forced to use them. So good luck trying to sell milk outside of the Canadian Dairy Cartel — I mean Commission; which incidentally received 4.7 million of your tax dollars in 2021.
The other part of the problem is that most of us have been conditioned to believe regulated bodies can do a better job of running stuff than private-sector bodies. And we only believe that because we’ve been conditioned to believe the government is a lean, mean, organized machine, when really it’s more like the first UNIVAC computer, which spent thirteen hours trying to spell “hat.” Thomas Sowell puts his finger on the problem: “[R]ight now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must ‘do something’ to get the economy moving again.”
What’s the government going to do about the housing market? What’s the government going to do about rental prices? What’s the government going to do about understaffed hospitals and schools? What’s the government going to do about the fact that I only had seven dehydrated carrots in my instant soup-powder mix? If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, you know the conditioning has worked.
How did we get here? As with everything, it starts with sin, which in this context looks like a dark and perverted desire to avoid responsibility. If people can be convinced that such a desire is justified, all it takes is some benefactor, in this case the state, to come along with an offer of “help.”