There is much discussion about the wisdom of bailouts, the TARP program, and the like. Mark T. Mitchell, a teacher of political theory at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, offers some keen insight:

 

"The economic turmoil our leaders are laboring so mightily to stave off is the product, not of anonymous market forces, but of our failure to respect limits.

 

"A sense of propriety provides limits for both individual and corporate action. Limits create stability; they give form and meaning to society, as a skeleton gives form to the body. When a broad consensus on what constitutes propriety is lost, the sense of limits collapses. Form is reduced merely to a massive lump where distinctions are lost: where sacredness means nothing and therefore nothing is profane; where all things are made public and privacy loses its meaning; where the silly and the serious mingle and no one knows whether to laugh or to mourn.

 

"We have been told that we can be rescued from our financial woes by a massive infusion of money. We have been told that all means must be employed to protect our way of life.  But why are we not being asked to take a hard look at our way of life? Perhaps it is precisely this way of life that has brought us to such dire straits. When Americans fail to see the impropriety of running up record levels of consumer debt, we should not be shocked that our public officials do not hesitate to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to shore up our way of life, even at the expense of our children and grandchildren. Surely we have lost a sense of propriety when we are willing to secure our comfort at the expense of future generations.

 

"The real solution is a restoration of a sense of limits - of responsibility born of propriety.  If we choose this harder but better way, our grandchildren will thank us for it.  If we don't they will, as they should, rue our lack of restraint as they chafe under the burden of our irresponsibility."
 
Amen.