The Demise of Personal Responsibility

Personal responsibility is the willingness to both accept the importance of standards that society establishes for individual behavior and to make strenuous personal efforts to live by those standards. But personal responsibility also means that when individuals fail to meet expected standards, they do not look around for some factor outside themselves to blame. The demise of personal responsibility occurs when individuals blame their family, their peers, their economic circumstances, or society for their failure to have a successful life.

For many years, American public policy emphasized the importance of personal responsibility, which also meant that government programs set up to help individuals also expected such individuals to make wise decisions and then make every effort to implement their decisions. An important and somewhat controversial aspect of this approach is that government decides, based on an appeal to traditional or widely accepted values, what good choices are and then ensures that people are rewarded for the right choice or punished for the wrong choice, all the while emphasizing that individuals are responsible for their behavior.

That changed with the implementation of the welfare state in 1964. According to the US Census Bureau, the poverty rate (the proportion of all persons living in households whose total incomes were judged insufficient to meet minimum US living standards) was 15 percent in 1966. In 2020, after more than 50 years and spending approximately 25 trillion dollars fighting poverty, the official poverty rate was 11.4 percent. Would you consider it a successful program?

The welfare programs encourage irresponsible behavior and dependence on government handouts. If a welfare recipient works, they typically lose benefits. The welfare system makes it economically irrational for most low-income couples to marry. Couples could have children but would lose benefits if they married. And many other stupid rules. Lack of personal responsibility breeds self-pity and despair. Consequently, in just a few years, families depending on welfare began to lose the hunger to succeed.

Of course, some percentage of those receiving federal handouts are in a bad situation through no fault of their own, and helping them is not necessarily reinforcing irresponsible behavior. Unfortunately, current policy enables tens of millions of Americans (and who knows exactly how many illegal aliens) to abrogate personal responsibility for their own welfare.

As the great economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell notes, “The welfare state shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people.”

A popular misconception is that the environment, not personal choice, is the root cause of dysfunctional communities in big cities. If the environment, including the family and larger social milieu, determined who was or was not a miscreant then virtually everyone in some areas of large cities would be one. That is not the case. The larger environment, including family dynamics, has a role, but ultimately personal decision-making is the key factor.

Recent policy choices are further abandoning personal responsibility by opting to “help” those who do not meet their responsibilities:

• College loan forgiveness – the Biden administration unilaterally decided to forgive college loans up to $10,000. Why choose college loans to forgive? The people who took up those loans signed up to pay them and use the money to finance a college education.  Some decided to forgo loans and financed their education and work while attending school; others paid their loans. What is so special about this group of youngsters that we should forgive the obligations they chose? Mind you, the money is not the government’s money.  That money comes from those of us who pay taxes.
• Mortgage relief – The Biden administration is set to enforce a new rule that will compel potential homebuyers who spent their lives paying their bills on time and building good credit scores to pay more for their mortgages. Why? To subsidize the loans assumed by higher-risk borrowers. Beginning May 1, prospective homeowners with a credit rating of 680 or more “will pay, for example, about $40 per month more on a home loan of $400,000.” “Homebuyers who make down payments of 15% to 20% will get socked with the largest fees.”It’s difficult to understate the perverse incentives this policy will encourage. Is it fair for those people who have spent their adult lives borrowing responsibly and paying their bills on time? Is it fair to those who have saved for years to acquire enough money for a down payment on a home that approaches the rate at which they can avoid a Federal Housing Administration–subsidized loan and the premium it imposes on your mortgage insurance? For all their diligence and hard work, the Biden administration will now punish them so that consumers who were not similarly conscientious can have access to better mortgage rates and lower down payments. Does this make sense?
• Academic merit – Most universities are dropping the SAT and ACT entrance exams not because they fail to calibrate both past achievement and the likelihood of future aptitude, but because too many do too poorly and thus find themselves unequal to those fewer who do too well. Grade point averages are losing significance since the achievers succeed supposedly only by advantage and not by hard work, preparation, and talent. University admissions increasingly have little to do with talent. Or rather talent is described not so much as the ability to think analytically and computationally, to have mastery of language, spoken and oral, or some acquaintance with the referents, historical, scientific, and literary, of our civilization. Instead, qualifications are becoming more a matter of “life experiences,” “community service,” “activities,” or commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”. Courses are watered down and grades inflated. The D and F grades have all but disappeared. The A? It’s become inflationary to the point of being utterly meaningless. Current courses on comic books, movies, and social media, interspersed with the proper adjectives, black, queer, and feminist, promulgate not just for ideological reasons of indoctrinating impressionable teens, but to ensure that almost anyone admitted to university can pass such “courses.
• Law and Order – Smash-and-grab, looting, shoplifting, and even violent assault increasingly either do not lead to arrest, indictment or conviction, or incarceration. In many cities, prosecutors insist laws do not represent natural and ancient ideas of morality—such as thievery is always wrong and assault endangers society—but simply a particular value system of the oppressive rich and increasingly in America the so-called rich white population. In short, they are promoting a sense that the robbers are entitled to that which they did not earn. Current Progressive thinking does not believe law, order, and calm exist because those who would disrupt them fear the consequences more than the advantage of taking what you want or hurting whom you please.
• Income-Based Utility Bills – Borrowing an idea pursued by Karl Marx (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs“), California’s three largest power companies have put forward a new plan for how homeowners will pay their energy bills. The general idea is that the cost of the actual electricity you use each month will be separated from the “infrastructure charge,” i.e. the cost of maintaining and building the grid that delivers that electricity. Users will pay a smaller fee for the actual amount of electricity they use but a larger, fixed monthly fee for maintaining the grid.  The new proposal suggests four separate tiers of monthly payments which are based entirely on income. The more you make the more you’ll pay to maintain the grid, regardless of how much energy you use. Hmm!, it sounds like Socialism.

Yes, life can be difficult. However, if we are always searching for someone else to shoulder our misfortunes, we will never be happy or fulfilled. Worse yet, we will never succeed. Children need to learn this when they are young. I fear for our future if every misadventure, or bad result, is shifted onto someone else. Our civilization can only prosper by overcoming misfortune, not succumbing to it.