Responsibility vs Victimization
The general public has fallen lock-step into the victim role while the government is enabled to take over our responsibilities for handling our monies.
The recent decisions by our Legislature in the USA have guaranteed our loss of yet more: that of our personal responsibility to manage our own money, and the freedom to fail.
Just like a parent with a child who is learning about failure and learning from those failures, the general public needs to learn how to fail, and work itself out of a mess. Just like a child who is never taught failure, never allowed to fail, has that parent with the umbrella always standing over them, parachute attached to them, will always need to be rescued, society has succumbed to allowing the government the same position of enabler.
Perhaps it is this mentality (“government save me!”) of a victim that allows for the expected rescue (bail out) when something goes wrong? So many members of society are true victims of crimes, whether as children or adults, that the scenario sits there awaiting reenactment. Perhaps so many adults have acted out in aggressive manner, that even the legislatures feel comfortable playing the now-necessary role of abuser-rescuer, having dragged the innocent victim citizen into play in the first place.
People are not learning from their mistakes. They don’t know how to, just like they don’t allow their children to learn from their mistakes. The current thought is: everyone is totally equal in all things and either no one receives a trophy, or everyone does. Everything the child does is “great!” and talk of room for improvement is dismissed as being abusive and negative. The child is left with feelings of victory with no correct reasons to attach to it, or of failure and no one and no place to work on correct feelings.
From years ago when the stock market, specifically, melted down, many seasoned investors felt that was the end of the problems: those that thought they could ignorantly make fast, safe money, were obviously weeded out. They shied away from reentering the market, and allowed those who were wise and somewhat savvy to continue. That market allows for newcomers to dabble and not disturb it.
But it appears the ignorant moved over into wanting to make that fast money in real estate. Buy more than they could afford, not bother to read contracts, maybe they even engage in magical thinking? But there they are, duped by bigger guns who took advantage of them. Now the government comes in to rescue them.
What have they learned? Only that if they mess up, government will rescue them. If they had been allowed to fail, the lesson learned would have been a good one. Government needs to reevaluate their bailout plan, and use it to truly benefit the citizens who didn’t bother to do their homework regarding home buying. Let them dig themselves out of their errant ways, with a little good enabling such as lower rates, and they will learn the error of their ways.
Whatever happened to being allowed to fail, and to learn from that failure? I hope not gone, with society.