I plan to write a longer piece on my other channels about responsibility, but I wanted to take advantage of my daily memo to jot down some ideas I have about the thoughts I want to share on those publications.
Our country has become a nation of people who want to avoid responsibility. The ability to avoid responsibility provides one of the attractive aspects of socialism. Under socialism, people don't expect you to act in your own interest. You only act in the interest of the collective. The discrete nature of humans (i.e. they are individuals) makes the idea of a human collective totally fallacious, yet people seem to think that it's an attractive concept.
More and more people in this country want to turn responsibility over to lawmakers. I use the term "lawmakers" because they only want to write rules; they don't want to take responsibility for their effects. When they write laws, they expect others to follow or enforce those laws. They don't pass legislation because they also expect to enforce the laws they create. They expect others to do the enforcing. That expectation leads to the growth of the bloated bureaucracy that we have in this country.
But the enforcers don't even want to take responsibility. Police, for example, don't stop speeders because it is unsafe; they stop them because "it's against the law." I think you can see the vicious circle developing. Voters abdicate responsibility to lawmakers. Lawmakers abdicate their responsibility to bureaucrats. And the bureaucrats abdicate their responsibility to the abstraction we call "law."
The next time you hear someone refer to this country as "a nation of laws, not men" consider that this phrase absolves them of personal responsibility. Someday, they might wake up and realize that laws require enforcement by men.
You might also consider that giving up responsibility means giving up freedom.
I plan to expand on this idea on other channels, but for now…
Later,
Jim