Tradeoffs

Our resources are not infinite. We have to make choices.

Every choice we make forecloses other choices. A dollar spent on foreign wars, housing for illegal immigrants, or health care for a senior citizen on their death bed is a dollar we did not spend on infrastructure, going to Mars, or educating our most talented children. 

Politics is about making choices. As it turns out, there are no truly “third-rail” issues. Every policy, ultimately, is questionable. In a moment of financial crisis, for instance, many of the programs that we consider untouchable now would, in fact, appear not so necessary. 

Liberals, however, simply cannot process this reality. 

Their ideological commitments blind their vision. Instead of trying to forestall future crises by confronting problems head-on in the present, they simply ignore the fact that they have real choices to make.

Ameirca’s privileged position in the world: our vast natural resources, isolated geographical location, and the high quality of our founding stock population insulated America from the harsh necessities that dominates most regimes on earth. Once infected by progressive historicism, the American leadership class lost all contact with reality. 

Today there is no regime on earth as delusional as the one that runs DC. 

Our leaders believe we can do everything. We are, after all, the “greatest nation in the history of the world.” Of course we can pour money into the war in the Ukraine and house millions of illegal immigrants. We landed on the moon. Anyone pointing out that we cannot do everything all at once is a pessimist and a naysayer with a dark vision of the country.

The simple reality, however, is that we must make hard choices. We cannot run deficits forever. We cannot import every migrant on earth who wants to live here. We cannot stop every injustice on earth and right every perceived wrong. 

Everything is a choice. Money that we take from the taxpayers to give to the Ukraine is money that we could have spent on a border wall. By spending money fighting Putin we are not fighting the fentanyl crisis in our own country. 

The concept of fungibility of money—the fact a dollar spent in one place is one that could be spent elsewhere—must return to our public life. We cannot live in this dreamworld forever. Reality will catch up to us. Nature is real. There are some things we simply cannot control. 

Human life is limited. Our resources are limited. We will be forced to choose between bettering life for our own children and spending that money on foreigners. We will have to make choices. 

Even now, the wall of delusion is cracking. The optimism of the post-war order is in full-on collapse. Fewer and fewer Americans believe life will be better for their children than it was for them. A profound pessimism has infused American life. 

For life to get better for all of us, we must abandon utopian dreams. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. We cannot make life perfect but we can make it better. We have to be hard-headed and realistic, however. 

Take criminal law, for instance. Singapore executes about a dozen drug dealers a year and has one of the lowest rates of drug addiction and overdoses in the world. The price of saving the lives of Singaporeans who would otherwise die from addiction is to kill drug dealers on a regular basis. That peace comes at the cost of blood. 

Are we willing to do the same? Do we have the iron in our souls necessary to inflict real pain and punishment on criminals for the sake of peace? Are we willing to accept that our words are not enough, that we cannot cure drug dealers and criminals simply by talking to them?

Imagine, for a moment, how much money the United States would save if, instead of sending criminals to jail, we only used corporal and capital punishment. Flogging a criminal with a bamboo cane is a lot cheaper than building gigantic prison complexes. 

There is a trade-off here. Physically punishing criminals, and outright executing them when they have gone too far, would be an incredibly effective deterrent but it requires a toughness and hard-headedness that is alien to our liberal politics. It means accepting that some people cannot learn except through force and that some simply cannot learn at all. 

What price are we willing to pay for peace? Are we willing to make the necessary trade-offs to have secure communities? Or will we continue to embrace our ideological commitment to utopia? 

In the end, I do not believe we will even have these choices. Very soon, the crisis of the last half-century plus of mismanagement and delusion will demand we pay our debts, both literal and metaphorical. In that moment, we will not have  the luxury of choice. 

 It would be better if we can avert that day of reckoning for as long as possible. Better to suffer a little now than a lot later. Trade-offs.