Social Compacts and Adult Conversations

As America transformed itself from a colonial backwater to the country with the highest living standard on the planet, a couple of basic principles applied in our society. First, the vast majority of adults willingly helped their neighbors when genuine basic needs went unmet. Second, if adults chose to have children, the adults (and their extended families) understood implicitly that it was THEIR responsibility to provide for all children. Until the mid-1960’s most Americans thought long and hard about the implications of taking on the expenses of having children prematurely. Americans who chose to have children before they had done what was necessary to acquire valuable job skills were virtually assured of having severely limited living standards. And they knew it.
Suddenly as some of our leaders try to face the realities of getting our financial house in order, we are hearing the phrase, “Social Compact.” Is compact the right word? Compacts are agreements. And as we hear this phrase, we are led to believe that somehow we all previously “agreed” to this vague notion of a social compact. We are also led to believe that somehow if government doesn’t raise taxes or borrow more money, we will all be “guilty” of violating a “sacred” compact.

Let’s put the phrase “social compact” in proper historical context. With partisan majorities in both houses of Congress (sound familiar) LBJ believed government should underwrite many of the negative consequences of adults making poor life decisions. The benefits of pursuing the sequential stages of job skill development where supplanted by an easier path involving less sacrifice and less difficulty. “I have an entitlement to more creature comforts right now,” became a socially acceptable mentality to embrace. The beginning of what President Obama now calls a sacred “social compact” began with these false promises made by a few under completely false premises.

Today’s focus group experts who counsel politicians will never tell us that Lyndon Johnson actually created a deadly economic trap for American society. And slick demagogues who rather enjoy experimenting with the development of new government programs routinely use phrases like “social justice” or “the fight for seniors and working families,” to justify their follies. Unfortunately, while duplicitous phrases can win elections, they can’t change economic realities. And the reality is far too many Americans have been led to believe they can skip the job skill development stage of their lives and simply become content with ever-increasing entitlement base lines. And too many middle aged Americans are being told once they reach 65, their government will have the means to take care of them.

With this historical perspective in mind the proper reaction when you hear President Obama use the phrase we must not “violate the social compact,” is to know it is code for something else. Our president is hell bent and determined to PRESERVE the entitlement mentality rather than encourage us to put an end to it. His hope is to continue to preside over an increasingly dysfunctional society where the act of seeking government assistance is becoming the more popular alternative to drive, energy, and ambition.

There is another phrase we hear these days. It speaks of having an “Adult Conversation” about entitlements. Maybe we should form a social compact and reject the idea of allowing our elected officials to make false promises based on false premises before we completely destroy what it actually means to be an adult. Then we can have grown up conversations about lots of things.

Social Compacts and Adult Conversations