Underpinning the moronically obvious election year ploy at the root of Joe Biden’s recently announced student debt bribe is another clear illustration how basic morality has no bearing among the Far Left puppeteers of Biden’s presidency.
Debt obligation isn’t just an American tradition; it’s pretty much the basis of the entire institution of finance. When did it become morally acceptable to borrow money and not pay it back? Only when Democrats are desperate to hold onto power?
The point is and has been widely observed for decades. James Dorn wrote in a 2010 essay for the Foundation for Economic Education that the growth in government and the development of the “nanny state” that solidifies power by making the populace more dependent has sapped the nation’s backbone and made expectation – not initiative – a staple.
“One cannot blame government for all of society’s ills,” Dorn writes, “but there is no doubt that economic and social legislation, especially since the mid-1960s, has had a negative impact on individual responsibility. Individuals lose their moral bearing when they become dependent on government. Subsidies, bailouts, and other aspects of the “nanny state” socialize risk and reduce individual accountability. The internal moral compass that normally guides individual behavior will no longer function when the State undermines incentives for moral conduct and blurs the distinction between right and wrong.”
Dorn’s connection between government coddling, the abandonment of accountability and declining morality was based on his rearview from 2010, but it was nothing if not prophecy for the 2020s.
It seems more elements of American society see right and wrong as relative. Black Lives Matter terrorists attacked and burned U.S. cities the summer of 2020 based on their phony calls for “social justice.” The reality was that thousands of criminals simply wanted an excuse to destroy and loot their neighbors. When confronted with the immorality of the destruction and theft of private property, apologists justified that the property was insured – so what was the harm?
How do you debate or convince someone that uses that kind of justification for victimizing someone else? The argument is clearly lost on President Biden and the socialist hacks in his administration, who used the tired but convenient excuse of Covid recovery to expand governmental power and now to bribe part of an American electorate that, overall, views his presidency as rotten on all fronts.
The logic is clear. Biden’s student debt bailout targets a minority of the population – most Americans don’t go to college and fewer graduate – but those who do will earn on average $1 million more over their lifetimes than those who don’t. This cadre of graduates tend to be liberals and voted for Biden overwhelmingly – hint, hint.
Obvious arguments abound. What of all of us who came before, borrowed money for school and paid it back? What about those that will seek future loans? Older sister gets her loan abolished, what about younger sister coming a few years behind? What of the small businesses – the restaurant owners, the welders, the one or two-person HVAC companies, the mechanic shops – all who borrowed start up funds to pursue their livelihoods and paid the money back? Where’s the fairness in rewarding a slim segment of borrowers who are generally better off and who just happen to mostly vote Democrat?
Thankfully, the inconsistency isn’t being lost on the discussions surrounding Biden’s move. The transfer of some $500 billion in personal debt onto the whole of the tax paying population isn’t coming without rebuke, although it is myth to imagine this figure will be anything but another set of numbers added to an already staggering national debt. Be assured the truism remains: debt doesn’t disappear once the money has been spent – it is still owed by somebody to somebody. Knowing that pits one group of Americans against another – yet again.
We can chalk it up as simply another dismal outcome of Biden’s disastrous presidency and like Afghanistan, inflation, vaccine mandates, the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, cascading urban crime and more, it is seeded in a key notion – the willful repudiation of right and wrong.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.