A Word on Personal Responsibility and Free Choice

by Eric Hite

Conservatives are portrayed as uncaring because we do not support the social policies touted by others. We are not uncaring, but we do have different beliefs about when to help others. I must point out, that we are strong supporters of personal responsibility and in an individual’s right to make their own choices. These two concepts must go hand in hand or they become weakened.

Assume an individual makes enough money to cover all their bills. If this person chooses to gamble their money away instead of paying their house payment (repeatedly) and the bank starts foreclosure proceedings, should this person be “bailed out” by someone else? What about the government? The government has no business in covering the bad debts of it’s citizens and no constitutional authority to do so. So what about the neighbor of this individual? Should he help his neighbor? After all, that is a moral “responsibility” in many systems, right? If the neighbor helps him out, he may have learned his lesson and change his behaviors in the future. He may even be able to repay the money his neighbor helped him with. This would be great! The neighbor gets his money back, the individual fixes his life and learns a lesson, and the moral obligation to help has been met. Unfortunately, this is an idealistic result that is unlikely to happen in the real world. People learn behaviors when they are young. People are afraid of change. If the neighbor were to really catch the individual’s mortgage up to date, the likely outcome is that the individual would pay his mortgage for a couple of months, but he would go back to gambling away his money in a short period of time. He would then end up in a similar position later. How has the neighbor helped?

To compound the issue, when the government becomes involved, the people become dependent on the government’s help. The people using the government services see the “help” as being free. This is partly because they are not paying for the service. They are taxed (in theory), but the taxes are not associated with the service they are receiving. Add to this, that the people are not expected to repay the government at some future date either. When people become dependent on the “free” services they are receiving, there is no incentive to quit using the services. In fact, it becomes it’s own disincentive to personal responsibility. The individual will look at the possibility of getting off the service and will think “I will lose this benefit if I _____”.

Everything to this point explains why we really are more caring than we have been given credit for. Conservatives want everyone to succeed in whatever they attempt (as long as it is legal). We want to help the people that have become entrapped by the left, like the above example, but we realize that we can do more harm than good if we do the wrong thing to help. There is a saying, “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. We want to help educate people how to do the things that they are having problems with. “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime” is another good saying that fits well. Once it looks like an individual has begun the change, then we are more willing to look at helping them through the rough patch. This could be money or some other assistance.


The secret is that the left really wants people on these “services” for two reasons. One reason is that they want people dependent on them (government). Another reason, which is tied to the first, is that they want power. In government, one group of people must to be voted into office. These people need the power and social recognition to feel important and the only way to get the power is to be elected. The only way (in their opinion) to get elected is to make sure that people like what you are doing for them. This means that you have to give them something, higher minimum wage, jobs (government contracts to build a bridge to nowhere), or tax loopholes for special interest groups. The other group in government is not elected. They run all the government agencies. These agencies create rules that people have to abide by almost like they were laws. Which agencies do this? You must be kidding me if you cannot think of a couple. Read this list and see if you recognize some of them: OSHA, the DOT, the EPA, and the Department of Housing just to name a few. The more people are dependent on government to supply services for them, the more jobs are available in these agencies and the more money is available for salaries. Who are these people to tell us what and how to do things in our lives? Our nation was founded on freedom of the individuals.