“The council ought to do something” growled a friend who’d been stuck in a peak hour traffic jam.
That innocuous comment illustrates the fundamental challenge facing the developed world’s politicians – that we expect our governments to fix every problem we encounter.
In the case of the local traffic jam, the cars creating gridlock are parents driving their children to two nearby large private schools.
Despite the problem being caused by the choices of individuals – those decisions to send their kids to those schools and to drive them there – our modern mindset is “the government aught to do something” rather than suggesting people should be making other choices.
Socialising the costs of our private decisions is one of the core beliefs of the 1980s mindset.
Eventually though the money had to run out as we started to expect governments to solve every problem.
We’re seeing the effects of this in the United States where local governments are now having pull up black top roads, close schools and renege on retirement funds as those costs become too great.
As a society we have to accept there are limits to what governments can do for us.
Increasingly as the world economy deleverages, tax revenues fall and the truth that a benign government can’t fulfill our every need starts to dawn on the populace, we’ll realise that expecting politicians and public servants to save us is a vain hope as they simply don’t have the resources.
Bruce Springsteen puts this well in his song “We Take Care Of Our Own.”
The truth today is the cargo cult mentality of waiting for governments or cashed up foreigners to come and save us is over.
We’re going to have to rely more on our own businesses, families and communities to support us in times of need.
The existing institutions of the corporate welfare state are beginning to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
Joe Hockey knows this, but as a paid-up agent of the establishment he doesn’t dare nominate the massive cuts to middle class welfare and big business subsidies that are necessary to reform those institutions.
Waiting for the council to fix the local roundabout is nice but it doesn’t address the bigger problems.
It’s up to us to build the new institutions around our local communities and families. This is not a bad thing.
This is probably one of the most succinct explanations of the welfare expectant state that we (and Greece and lots of Europe) have become. A recent opinion I read rings very loud “what one person receives without working for, another must work without receiving”
Many democratic governments around the world need to learn the lesson that you can’t multiply prosperity by dividing it because this process has resulted in the failing financial structure and falling productivity we witness and results in the erosion of democracy itself.