Time is the one luxury that can not be saved or retrieved. Each of us are alloted a certain amount of time to live out our life as humans on this planet. What we do with our time has the power to influence, for better or worse, those around us.

The case for leading one’s life according with an eye towards the “hereafter” is a question of faith. The choice is ours. :)

Rather than modesty, I would assert it’s both humility and respect we need to temper a pedal to the metal pursuit of excellence. Little in popular culture respects anything else…there is an awful lot of snarkiness and belittling of anything one opposes because it is a cover for self-loathing that may be acknowledged or not.

Fox said it in one of his posts, he was seeking the “discipline” of contentment…..I don’t know if the outward appearance of the Amish is one of “modesty” or respectful discipline in search of contentment. Then again, being Amish aint for everybody nor should it be.

Sometimes I think “modesty” is a default position…too easy, self efacement as a salve for consignment but maybe I’m confusing it with false-modesty.

Gay “marriage” illustrates part of the problem with entitlements and the mind numbing tax code. Gays should be able to form the legal arrangements that they desire. The money that they earn should be considered theirs. Social Security should be phased out. The tax code should be replaced.

As much as I admire the ideal of the yeoman farmer, was it not Jefferson himself that negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, the ultimate extension of “empire”? Truth be told, American history is the story of the continual enlargement of our influence and the immodesty of our aspirations. I don’t mean to disparage this spirit unequivocally because it is tremendously productive and positive in many respects. Nonetheless, one can spy within it the seeds of our present problems and our eventual downfall.

The root of it is our relative youth (it will take another few centuries before we are anywhere near as densely settled as Europe) and the Enlightenment philosophy of our regime. Augustine warned us in the City of God about the dangers of the libido dominandi, the imperial impulse. Both by accident (geography) and design (our regime), America is suffused with that impulse. I fear that it will take catastrophe, tragedy, and a breakup of the country before we realize the wisdom of a limited republic.

Government did not clamp down because it actually thought encouraging the apparatus was good policy.
Reserve currency status emboldens them in taking another slog on the bottle.

How many times did we hear phrases like “The public is waiting to see what the President will do to make their lives better” during the immediate interim after last falls election. Funny, but after all these years of listening to chatter about “democracy”, the public seems to think its job is to wait to see what their government will do for them…to protect them…to nurture them in retirement…to educate them….to create jobs….to stimulate technological advances. While these things are wonderful pursuits if government is so inclined….expecting a government to be the principle provider will result in a very circumscribed, very distilled and entirely denatured approach to human life.

When the upper tax rate was far higher in the 50′s , it would have been expected to have a people cling to these sentiments but now that we have a top tax rate far lower, we actually have an increase in these sentiments in a completely counter-intuitive manner. To have a people who expect so much of their government and then turn out in so low a numbers at the polling venues…another bit of counter-intuitive “reality”.

I think the public is demonstrating a kind of alcoholic pathology in their relationship with the current moonshine government. They continue to think the government is killing their future drop by drop but they are afraid that their life would somehow deteriorate without it. They take another hit of the hair of the dog that bit em and learn to shrug off the continuing degradation.

This is not a simple maligning of government, it is a cautionary rebuke of a government with pretensions of omnipotence and a people who have far more potential power to move things in a more productive direction than they think. You are completely correct that if there was a greater historical awareness, things would likely be be entirely different. It aint nostalgia, it’s prudent planning.

Taken in another direction….the last 16 years are a tremendous essay in what not to do and if the lesson were used…and compared against the decades of history prior to the last 16 years, we could craft a far better future.

The banking crisis happened because fed regulators refused to clamp down on Wall Street, despite years of specific information that pointed to the consequences.

A serious epidemic could be stopped if the public health agencies used their powers of quarantine. They do have the power, but the aristocratic connections of the HIV virus caused them to stop using quarantine except in the most extreme circumstances. And public health protection has also been eroded by HIPPA, the privacy act, which doesn’t really stop criminals from using medical records but does interfere with the quick exchange of information. HIPPA was sold as an increase of rights and freedom, and like most other such increases, it’s really a hindrance to life and liberty.

“A return to a modest republic” is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but we aren’t going to get there until we disentangle the concepts of “liberty” and “rights”. We really shouldn’t be asking “how do we get more rights”, but rather “how do we insure that an ordinary man can support an ordinary family”. Those two goals are in fact mutually exclusive.