"My other piece of advice, Copperfield... you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!" -Mr. Macawber, from David Copperfield.
These words from Charles Dickens reflect on the reality of economics. To stay within ones means allows one to keep afloat, so to speak. But to overspend, to find oneself daily sinking into a morass of credit or expenditure beyond ones means is only to court disaster.
The Catholic eyeing the current rush in Washington, where politicians of both parties, and of course, the President, seek ways to lift the debt ceiling of the country in order to stave off a default on the part of the United States, push one to ask what the Catholic solution must be. While the Republicans in the House compromise ever farther on the question of how much this ceiling is to be lifted and what will not be affected in the government's ever growing list of social programs, the Democrats in the Senate cast down any proposals that touch the sacrosanct social spending that caused this very disaster. The United States Bishops, ever anxious that any semi-socialist program aimed for the poor, whether these poor are legal or not, does not suffer harm, remain totally silent when it comes to an insistence that the government desist from any funding of that which is immoral. It is as if Socialism, and indeed, the gospel of Liberalism, was the only gospel the hierarchy felt worth defending.
But the Catholic is faced with a problem that wringing hands or socialist minds cannot simply make disappear. The United States has vastly overspent its own government budget. Now trillions of dollars are spoken of casually, as if the left could ignore such inconvenient realities as the treasury, and simply continue to buy its votes by funding the recipients of the Nanny State. But reality has a way of making itself felt, no matter how sweet the dream of buying the ignorant or indolent.
We are forced to look at the morality of a citizenry that has gotten used to living beyond its means, that always thinks that benefits payed by a government are an inalienable right, whether that money exists or not. It is too often a citizenry that is paying out a kind of blackmail money to the self-interests of vocal minorities in order to soothe the consciences of European descendants that no longer believe in what their ancestors stood for. And then this is all compounded by a world that believes that the individual is the center of the universe, and that every sorrow must be monetarily compensated, since any suffering violates ones sacrosanct right to always be happy and enjoying oneself. At last, however, the free rides look to be cut back, if that is, the politicians have the courage to take the consequences of their parties' extravagances.
The Catholic is forced to look at the consequences of immaturity by politicians anxious to buy the electorate. He must see the fate of Mr. Macawber as related by Charles Dickens. Overspending for Macawber meant the Debtor's Prison. One cannot go on spending more than one has without courting disaster. Justice, in fact, demands that the one to whom money is owed, is paid. While money is a convention, what it represents is not. More goes out than is coming in. Will the government try to really face reality, or will yet another band-aid be put on the mortally wounded State? It is to feared that self-interest will win out over the prospect of Doomsday. Yet the Catholic should know, that love of self, of pleasure, of fun, at the price of the common good, is a recipe for disaster in this world and in the world to come.
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