Money is the Root of All Stagnation
All this cash we are spending like crazy: what are we getting for it?
“Can't you hear that jingle-jangle sound? Oh yeah! It's money, money, money by the pound!” - Doc Terminus
Certainly one of people’s favorite Bible verses is 1 Timothy 6:10. While often quoted as saying, “Money is the root of all evil,” it says, “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Or some translations say it is the root of “all kinds” of evil.
We love quoting that these days, but we certainly don’t act like we believe it. America is obsessed with money. Based on the state of politics today, most Americans fundamentally believe the role of government is to keep the money flowing. We treat stock market figures as the real opinion polls of presidents.
So it should be no surprise that most politicians these days run on a platform of money: how to increase it and where to spend it.
My dear governor, Gretchen Whitmer, will deliver a State of the State address tonight, where she will call for free community college, and preschool, and more investment in transportation, and probably many other things. It will be no different than most State of the Union addresses: we need to fund this program, and that program. Let’s fund yet another jobs training program, which will fix all of globalization’s ills.
America doesn’t need more money. We are swimming in money. Let’s count how much we love money:
The U.S. national debt is $34 trillion dollars ($264,000 per taxpayer)
Student loan debt is $1.7 trillion dollars
Personal debt is $75,000 per person
We love spending money so much we spend what we don’t have. How often do we ask ourselves if we’re getting a good return on investment for this drunken binge of spending?
Should we have free community college? More than half of Americans already have a college degree or post-secondary credential. Yet millions of college graduates work in jobs that didn’t require college classes. When we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to send people to college to complain about general education classes and then take a job unrelated to their degrees, we have wasted all of those dollars—and all of that time. They failed to get a true universal education, and sacrificed four or more years of their life they could have spent actually producing things.
At this point, paying people to play hopscotch instead of college for four years would have far greater benefits, since at least they would get some physical fitness in and relieve a bit of the crushing medical expenses in our big, fat future.
What about light rail? Governor Whitmer’s commission on stopping the slow-motion suicide of Michigan said we need more public transportation. Never mind the crumbling road infrastructure and the incumbent governor’s utter inability to deliver on the basis of her entire 2018 campaign: fix the damn roads.
There should be little doubt in how that’s going to go, right? It will be a bunch of grandiose vanity projects, all of which come in significantly over budget and years down the road, and which attract very few riders, let alone millions of young Democrat voters to save the state.
Progressives’ love affair with light rail systems seems detached from reality. Unless, I suppose, you cynically accept that the major purpose of light rail projects is laundering tax dollars through the public works projects to unions, big-city contractors, and other political allies.
In America’s history, large-scale transportation projects were a big deal: canals, harbors, transcontinental railroads, and the interstate system. But, those are all finished. And ironically, we let many of those infrastructure systems crumble and decay while we are obsessed with making marginal improvements to already troubled systems.
A great example of that is education. America already has a universal public education system. There are not entire communities whose kids are “stuck” in farming jobs who never attend any school. Virtually every American goes to school. Public schools—especially in urban areas where we are told we need to spend billions of dollars to build monorails—have significant challenges. You don’t need me to recount them here. We already can’t afford college as is, with President Biden breaking laws to try to find ways to subsidize student loans.
Yet we are totally obsessed with spending money to make young people go to even more school. In most cases, school they don’t need, or should have received in high school. How is more school going to “fix” anything?
American public policy seems stuck in the past, still fighting the challenges of 1824, not 2024.
If you identify any large-scale problem affecting America today, an army of people will show up with their hands out, promising a solution. But what have we solved? How does just shoveling money at problems fix them? Can you think of even one good example, let alone 5, or 10?
It seems like most late-stage empires, obsession with money leads to an amazing amount of laziness, and they fall to those who aren’t so obsessed with money, or don’t have as much. The denizens of the empire sense it has spent itself, and loot the public treasury for anything left before the poo hits the fan.
America has a worrying culture problem, not a money problem. Giving a person with deep personal problems more money is only going to magnify those evils in their lives, so why should we expect anything different when we throw money at human institutions or human nations?
We are so deep in, so inured, that we don’t even question these things any more. We are like a fish in water, being asked to describe what water is.
There are two young fish swimming along who happen to meet an older fish. The older fish nods at them and says: ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks: ‘What the hell is water?’ - David Foster Wallace.
Has an elevated train system revitalized any city? No, but policing them properly arguably has.
Is spending more on college fixing any of the problems with our education system? Is it even helping people get better jobs? Job training is not supposed to be the job of a university, but we’ve forgotten that. Instead of a universal education, we just want a magic paycheck power-up.
I am very concerned about demographics and birth rates, seeing the impending disaster not far down the road. Others are seeing that problem more and more. Yet what are their proposed solutions?
Money. Money money money.
Throw more money at people. Pay them to have children. Give them more benefits at work. And while that does seem to result in a minor boost in birth rates, it hasn’t revolutionized anything yet. Those nations still find their citizens unwilling to let the human race survive. If all this money around us is supposed to make us happy, why do people seem so utterly depressed and pessimistic?
America is broke. We are spending money we don’t have. We are faced with so many fundamental problems that people can feel it in their very souls, but we have no satisfying answers. The water we swim in is money, and that’s all we can see anymore. Just one more jobs training program. One more department to spend a budget. One more public works program that has no hope of coming in on time and on target. That’ll solve everything.
You know what type of thinking that is? The thinking of an addict. Just one more, and then I’ll focus on getting better. One more fix is all I need.
Until we fundamentally rethink our nation’s addiction to money, there is little hope for renewal.