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Why Bother Being Responsible?
Posted by Raven on February 22nd, 2009
From today’s Boston Globe:
Brian Carpenter bought his Woburn home in 1980, and 29 years later, he has never missed a mortgage payment. It wasn’t always easy. With three kids, it meant driving old cars, clipping coupons, and brown-bagging it to work.
Now, he sees the federal government committing nearly $1 trillion to bail out banks and struggling homeowners, and nearly $800 billion to offset economic damage caused by reckless lending and borrowing. What’s in it for him? Probably $13-a-week, the middle-class tax cut in the stimulus bill.
“What about people like me who are playing by the rules, who got a mortgage we could afford?” said Carpenter, 52, who programs building management systems for MIT Lincoln Laboratory. “Maybe I’m too old school, but you sign on the bottom line, and you’re responsible for it.”
Carpenter is among the vast majority of Americans who work, pay mort gages, borrow responsibly, and now find themselves facing the bill to bail out those who didn’t. Over the years they lived within their means. Now they’re asking: What for?
The anger underscores the dangers government faces in private sector rescues. While such interventions aim to benefit everyone by preventing severe damage to the economy, they also risk encouraging irresponsible behavior in the future. Economists call this “moral hazard.”
In other words, if homeowners believe the government will lower their payments if they fall behind, they won’t have as much incentive to keep paying mortgage bills on time.
A very interesting article, considering the very left leaning Globe published it. What’s more interesting are the comments being left on it. Go read.
February 22nd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
It is all too easy to get angry when I feel like I’ve followed the rules and that those who haven’t are getting rewarded for their irresponsible behavior. And if I’m not careful, I could get really depressed about it and question why I should bother being moral. Or start heading down the self-destructive path of envy.
At such times, I have to remind myself that life isn’t fair and that I follow the rules because it is the right thing to do, because what matters in the end is that I be true to my values and live a life pleasing to the Lord – and that in the end the only approval that matters is living with integrity and being faithful to God’s call upon my life – and to keep on striving even though I often fall short and have to keep on picking myself up.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:12 am
Looking over my comment above, I need to elaborate. That comment has to do with how we as individuals respond to unjust government policies – or unjust happenings in general.
Nonetheless, it remains most true that our government under its new leadership is heading down a disastrous road of rewarding bad choices and destroying productive activity by those who are making good choices (esp small business). At the society level, the result will be destructive to our social fabric as it sends us – honest and dishonest alike – down the failed socialist society rathole that we see in old Europe (mild-medium) and in Venezuela (grave) and Zimbabwe (thousands dead, millions destitute).
Let’s not mince words: our government is engaging in immoral spending and taxing actions that will rust out our nation’s frame, destroying the fabric of trust that makes freedom and a representative republic possible.
No, not impersonal “government”…it’s individuals who are responsible. Too many of our elected officials are responsible – and profiting by their immoral actions. And too many of us continue to elect these folks to office, worshipping the lie.
The hour is late, but the midnight chime has not sounded. But we have lurched closer to the precipice in such a shorter time than I would have thought. But on the bright side, the opportunists and summer patriots are exposing themselves – not a pretty sight, but better than a false facade because we are learning who are outing themselves as the enemies of our nation.
And we need to remember.
February 25th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
It is my belief that as time goes by and more and more people have to pay for what the slackers and cheaters get with seeming impugnity (including banks and automakers), the country is going to become more politically divided than it ever was under GW.
Of course, to a cynical old goat like me I could say that was the plan of his holiness (or his hollowness) to begin with, because without class warfare his kind would disappear.