Our National Interest And Childhood's End

 I have to admit that our deepening involvement in the war between Ukraine and Russia has me worried. Apparently, our intelligence and material assistance of the corrupt despots in Ukraine has done significant damage to the interests of the corrupt despots in Russia. Russia has nukes. The Russians don't see the world as we do. That means we cannot accurately predict what they might do in retaliation. Give a dirty bomb to a terrorist group, perhaps? Sink a carrier or two, perhaps?

Compounding this is that we have no national interest in that particular wino fight. Nothing happens to us no matter which side wins. Russia is clearly a regional hegemon and not a global power. It does matter to us a great deal that this skid row brawl is dragging on for months. Ukraine and Russia provide significant amounts of wheat and fertilizer to the world. By not helping to resolve this quickly, even if that meant giving Putin a good deal of what he wanted, we're making the world very unstable.

The last time wheat became pricey in Egypt, we ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood taking over. They didn't close the Suez Canal, but they could have. Why are we risking that?

Egypt is bad enough, but what about famines all over the world? We may not starve here, but does anyone want to place bets on Somalia or Ethiopia?

And then there's the southern border. We're allowing roughly 2,000,000 illegals to enter the country every year now. If Title 42 is dropped, that could go up substantially.

How about deep blue cities releasing criminals without bail and allowing shoplifters to walk if they take less than $900 of merchandise? That limit itself is a joke as you'd have to apprehend the perps in order to check to see if their haul was in the 4-figure range. No one is going to risk a physical altercation to do a price check. There's effectively no limit on shoplifting in these cities.

All of this is indicative of a society that sees our national interest as something selfish. Supporting Ukraine is moral. Admitting "refugees" is moral. Not arresting people from "marginalized" communities is moral.

All of these are moral only in a world where we have no national interest. We have no national interest if we don't have to pay for anything. In Life's Pricing Structure Is Broken, I wrote:

What kind of car would you buy if you could print money? Me, I'd buy a Lotus. You might buy a Ferrari. Why don't you do it now? I don't have a Lotus because it would take me a year to earn it. The Lotus would represent a year of my life. If I could print money in the Catican, the Lotus would represent ... nothing.

Our pricing structure is broken. We no longer connect sacrifice with possessions. This is what I meant when I blogged yesterday, "It looks to me like American society has turned out the lights of reason and turned on the black lights of subjectivism. We're all kind of stumbling around, learning as we go just what this means."

Children live a world where nothing has any real cost. Mommy and Daddy bring the noms, the clothes, the television and everything else. The tot simply consumes it without thought. If they deprive you of any of these things, it's a cause for tears and accusations of cruelty.

Inflation represents the end of this particular episode of national childhood. So will the famines arising from prolonging the war in Ukraine. So do the crime waves in our deep blue cities. So will the costs of supporting 5 million or more illegals and struggling with how they will harm our working poor.

Childhood's end is upon us. We're going to have to go back to a time when we discussed our national interest without feeling that it was inherently immoral.