Maybe we grew too rich to care. That is, enough of us became too rich to care. That is, to care for the less well off—in our town, in our country, in our world. Anybody walking down an urban American street may understand that plenty of people need help.
Our drug addicts need help. Who desires to be addicted to drugs or see their loved ones become addicted? Yet, in one of the richest countries in the world, we were unable to overcome the forces that decreased the ability to stay off drugs. We’ve heard a lot about stopping drugs from coming in—but if more of us had a purpose in life that involved contributing to society, we might never consider something like drugs, including alcohol.
When we gave the rich more ways to opt out of paying income taxes, we had less money to fund social security or deal with our ever increasing national debt. Or indeed, to fund programs to help addicts kick drug habits.
We also desire both less immigrants and less children. While our birth rate drops, we build walls to keep out migrants who could help make up for our decreasing births. That means, of course, less taxpayers for our increasingly elderly population—or to fund our military or programs to help recovering addicts.
We have increasingly seen our government as set up to help those who already have plenty to grab more. Eventually, though, those who don’t have, will outnumber those who do.
After the Second World War, our country was blessed with a flood of immigrants from countries devastated by that war. They worked in our factories—and also consumed the goods from those factories, contributing to a rising standard of living.
Immigration needs to be controlled, removed from the hands of traffickers, but immigration itself is an asset. It means growth, not only physically, but in new ideas and art as well as new workers and consumers. If we close off immigration entirely and see it as a curse to be overcome, we will die from a lack of growth in ideas as well as people.