We live in a great country. The American, "can-do" spirit has allowed us to achieve such monumental achievements in the realms of science, health, and technology. Who would have guessed 100 years ago that men would walk on the moon, that childhood disease would be virtually wiped out, or that an entire library could be stored in a hand-held device. These great achievements have bred in us an attitude that with enough time and money, we can solve any problem and conquer any difficulty.
While this is true, I believe, for challenges in the physical world. It is not true for challenges found in the non-physical (spiritual, social, philosophical, etc...) world. So often our modern society tries to fix social problems the same way they fix technical problems. The main difference, though, is that technical (scientific) problems follow a set of a rules. Once you understand the rules and the boundaries, you can find ways to use those to your advantage.
The non-physical worlds, however, do not follow a set of rules. This is a thought that seems to confound the liberals, intellectuals, and socialist of our time. They are always amazed that their "great experiments" don't work. They then complain that they would have worked, but they were not able to fully implement the idea because there was not enough money, time, or training.
The truth is that even if you had all the time in the world, money and training will not change the human spirit. Take the "war on poverty" for example. The fact of the matter is that there are some people who will do only the bare minimum to scrape by. Many of the social elite think that they don't have the education, or the skills, or the resources, or the support, or the __________ (fill in the blank), and they go on and on about how "unfortunate" people are. They never, ever say that the people have no ambition. As long as there are people with no ambition (and as long as the behavior is rewarded with handouts) people will continue to be lazy.
It comes down to this, there are no solutions to social problems. There are only trade-offs. We can only win the "war on poverty" by making everyone the same (which means taking everyone to lowest common denominator, i.e., poor). Of course, people that want everyone to be the same don't want to be different themselves and they definitely do not want to be poor. So they really aren't willing to make the trade off necessary.
It is election time and politicians are on the loose. The people will demand solutions. But that doesn't mean that they will get them. What they are more likely to get is the illusion of a solution by someone seeking their vote.
I want to live in a country and society that offers everyone individual freedom and liberty. The trade off, though, is that people must be responsible for their own choices. If you want a society that nobody wants for anything then the trade-off is personal freedom and personal choice. Make sure as you vote, you realize what you are trading for what you are getting.
