As we are seeking out categories to help us understand the debt crisis our nation is in, there is a basic distinction that has gone missing. I mean the distinction between money past and money future. I mean the distinction between money that exists and money that doesn’t.
Now everything we have is in the Lord’s hands. Money that exists can certainly go away. Moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. But, and here’s my point, money that doesn’t exist yet is even less stable. If you lay up treasures on earth, for every guard you hire to place over your gold stash, you should place at least three guards over your soul.
But future money . . .? Something else is going on there entirely, which means that we need to guard ourselves against a different kind of soul disease. What we need to guard against here is covetous gullibility. An inability to do this is the evil that has been wrought under the heading of “entitlements.”
There is the con man who takes the money you already worked for and already have, and who runs off with it. That is theft simpliciter, and it is money lost. Then there is a different kind of man, let us call him Sen. Moonbeam, who promises to pay out millions to everybody just a few years from now. This promise does not actually involve any existent money, and does not create the same kind of debt that borrowing existent money does.
There is the guy who steals your actual chickens, and then there is the guy who promises you a million unhatched ones.
This kind of promise has financial implications, as when a family fails to save for retirement on their own because they believe the false promise. This kind of promise dooes create obligations, and a need for forgiveness when the obligation is not met, but this kind of promise does not create wealth. If you met a businessman on an airplane who took a shine to you, had two or three cocktails too many, and promised you that he would send you a check the following week for a hundred thousand dollars (that he flat didn’t have), and you were fool enough to be checking your mailbox for six months, what should we say? When the day of cold reckoning eventually came, on that day you should not conclude that you “lost a hundred thousand dolloars.” The drunk businessman sinned by promising what he would or could not deliver, and you sinned by believing him. This (in idolation) is not theft. You can’t steal what isn’t there.
If someone promises you a political state during your retirement that is (um) unlikely, your the civic duty is to disbelieve him. You should reject the following plank in the platform of big governmenters of both parties.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Many of the trillions we are talking about are trillons in promised obligations, but they are not promises concerning anything tangible. You may take it as an axiom, that money that cannot be paid out, will not be paid out. If default is inevitable, then default will happen. If the promise is unkeepable, then the promise will not be kept. If the money is not there, and moreover, if the money never was there, then it follows, so it would seem, that the money is not going to be there. If wild and crazy promises were made (and they were), the time will come when everybody realizes that. When everybody realizes that, then we will stop checking the mailbox every day. These promises will not be kept. They were made by crazy people. They were made by economic illiterates. They were made over a dead cat at midnight during the full moon.
But, someone will say, the United States will meet all its obligations. Not this time, it won’t. Even the Republicans who know how to count are arguing for default, only they are not calling it that. The Republican efforts to “save Medicare,” for example, are efforts to break the promises and commitments made in small manageable ways, instead of in large unmanageable ways. Changes in Social Security retirement ages, for example, are ex post facto changes in the deal that was made. They are renegotiated promises, with the debtor in full control of all the negotiations.
Paper promises, like paper money, require honest men to execute them. And that, as it turns out, is where our real shortage is.