After watching Dan Ariely's presentation in class this afternoon, I had some thoughts that wouldn't really be great for classroom discussion. First of all, i believe the topic of today's discussion touched on some of the fundamental reasons why our country is in such a bad place. In general, the inability of most Americans to make "cool-state" decisions. These are, as Ariely described in the book, rational long term decisions.
From marriage to savings to electing the next president, Americans show an overwhelming failure in their ability to make rational long term choices. Consider the debt our country is in, over 16 trillion dollars, leaving each and every citizen of our country with over 51,000 dollars of debt. In the past 4 years of Obama's presidency the national debt has risen by over 5 trillion dollars. At some point our debtors will come knocking and this debt will have to be paid. Unfortunately there is also the option to continue what we've been doing and pass the debt along to our children and grandchildren, accumulating more debt along the way. As i said in my previous blog post the easy decision is usually the wrong decision. Its unbelievably easy to ignore the responsibility we have to leave our children a better country than we were given, but unfortunately thats the path our generation has continued to take.
Is it rational to spend more money than you make on a personal level? No! Then i must ask why its rational to do so on a national scale. Its difficult to make the decision to cut foreign involvement, decrease military presence around the world, reign in the out of control welfare spending, and in general decrease the size of government, but its these decisions that need to be made for long term prosperity and security. I don't say these things to support or denounce a particular party, but to illustrate the necessity of making "cool-state" choices concerning our government. The fact of the matter is that we cannot continue to make these short term choices, we simply can't afford to do it much longer.
I would love to leave my children a country with less debt and financial chaos than the one that was left to me, however, i really don't see a way to do this. Invariably the empire of fiat wealth we've erected will come to an end, it will be interesting to see how and when this will take place.
http://www.infowars.com/ron-pauls-farewell-to-congress-speech-transcript/
Read up, its well worth your time.
No comments:
Post a Comment