Moral Compass or Financial Roadmap?

Politicians today like to set boundaries and categories to make it easier for voters to identify with their agenda. This tactic is not only disingenuous, it also allows politicians to sidestep commitment to any sort of principles. They don’t have to pick a platform, they just follow every other politician in that category.

The most common distinction is to pick either socially (read: morally) or fiscally (read: spending) liberal or conservative. The split seems to be the stance-of-the-day for the follower-class of politicians in Washington, either socially liberal but fiscally conservative or visa versa. Each of these translates to undecided moderate. On any given issue, the politicians can excuse themselves from a tough decision by painting the issue in either a social or fiscal color.

The core problem with this classification is the inappropriate attempt to separate moral issues from economic issues. The reality of life is that morality on all sides ties directly to economic performance. Our country was founded on principles of morality and fiscal conservatism; the government had a limited role. Since our founding, major economic crises can be traced back to decisions that are either immoral or amoral; we don’t have to go back very far to find examples of this.

We had a housing crisis in which the mortgage industry boiled over sending our economy into turmoil. What’s interesting about the housing crisis, everyone has an opinion of how it occurred, the root causes, and all of the conclusions lead to a moral crisis; yet, in addressing the issue, the government took a strictly fiscal approach. The crisis came about because banks made loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back. A combination of personal entitlement, greed, a lack of personal responsibility, and government regulations favoring “fairness” fed the furnace of looming catastrophe.

Twice American means first following your moral compass, and second finding the most fiscally responsible financial roadmap to success. Knowing your direction without knowing your destination is as useless as knowing your destination but having no idea which way you are going. We need leaders who know where they are going AND how to get there; back to the principles that made this country great.