Liberals Assume Infinite Money

One of the things about liberals that always strikes me is that they seem to start with the assumption that we should always have money to spend for a good cause. So, if we need to extend unemployment benefits for a year? Well, do it! People in Africa need more money to fight AIDS? Go for it. Teachers could use higher salaries? Spend the money and hurry up about it!

Yet, there should always be questions asked about expenditures that we make. Is this the government’s job in the first place? Should this be a top priority? What are the downsides of spending this money? Liberals don’t ask questions like that. Nor do they ask what may very well be the most important question: Can we afford to spend this money?

You see, you may have multiple “good” options and have to choose between them. You may see something that’s worth the money, but you don’t have it to spend. That’s what life is like for people outside of the government.

Let me give you a real world example: Furnishing your house.

In college, people tend to have really shoddy furniture. Junk they found on the side of the road. Milk crates — and, here’s one you’ll all remember: The wooden spool. Why do people have this sort of inferior furniture? Because they’re cash poor and furniture isn’t their top priority.

Eventually, they get done with college, get a job, and get an apartment somewhere. So, what happens then? Maybe the best piece of furniture they have stays, but out go the milk crates, the spools, and the couches with a hole that their dog chewed in the side. They start hitting yard sales, the Salvation Army, and take any furniture their parents plan to throw out. The look of their living room improves.

Then finally, they move into a house and their thinking changes because they now have a sense of permanence. The furniture they buy today, they might still have in 20 years. So suddenly, they start really thinking about their decor. They start looking at furniture online and they decide it makes sense to spend some real money on furniture.

Still, unless they’re rich, they have to make choices. Do they get the really nice bed or the really nice refrigerator? Do they get the recliner or the coffee table? Are they willing to spend more than what they wanted to on a wide screen TV and put off getting a new couch for another year? These are the sort of trade-offs people make in the real world.

Liberals have a different philosophy when it comes to government. They believe we should borrow the money to get the bed, the refrigerator, the recliner, the coffee table, the couch, and the wide screen TV all this year and then 30 or 40 years down the road, somebody else will have to figure out how to pay for it. In the interim, they can enjoy all the rewards and let’s be honest here: It’s not as if the money that’s being spent is going to come out of their pockets, right?

In the world outside of government, people with no impulse control who spend far beyond their means end up creating a lot of problems for themselves. Those people are still better than liberals because the liberals are creating a lot of problems for all of us with their policies.

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