We live in a time of financial crisis.
Understandably, the focus is on how to get out of it, but we also need to ask how we got into it. A pretty good answer is too much debt. In fact, unsustainable borrowing provides a universal explanation for just about every aspect of our economic troubles – from the credit crunch to the Eurozone debacle.
But why did we borrow so much in the first place? The standard answer to that one is that we didn’t have enough money of our own, which provokes a further set of questions as to why this should be. Certainly, there’s a very interesting economic debate to be had here, but in a way it’s avoiding the real issue.
You see, the real explanation as to why we borrowed so much money, is not that we didn’t have enough of our own – it’s that instead of adjusting our consumption to our means we decided to make future generations pick up the bill.
There's an excellent exploration of this issue in a recent lecture given by David Willetts:
The pack-horse politics that Disraeli condemned has wormed its way into almost every aspect of policy making, not just economic policy. Furthermore it’s not just the preserve of the spendthrift left. Some on the right can be heard excusing social and environmental irresponsibility on the grounds that future generations will be in a much better position to deal with the problem than we are.
Willetts exposes the essential depravity of such thinking:
This is what it means to be responsible. This is what it means to be a conservative.