Back to school.

We are over $14 trillion in debt, $4 trillion more than we owed just two years ago. . . .

Unless we make hard decisions now, in less than a decade every dollar of federal revenue will go to covering the costs of Medicare, Social Security and interest payments on our debt.^[1]

Or in Mark Steyn's words: " . . . the colossal scale of our irresponsibility."

Sen. Dirksen once wittily observed about federal spending, "A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money." Ok. Maybe he didn't say it but even that bit of wit is, today, off by three orders of magnitude. Or 1,000%, if you prefer.

These are such stunning numbers and they've accrued over so many decades that it's clear that the numbers mean absolutely nothing. They guide nothing. We file them under "Ho hum." We absolutely do that.

The underlying strength and scale of the economy, the devastation of the rest of the world from WWII, and the minuscule burden of debt service made "tax, borrow, and spend" (of gold-plated New Deal provenance) the formula for political success, which formula was shielded by the stoutest armor plate imaginable from the assaults of reason, experience, and morality.

Reason said that the graph lines only sloped up the right side, experience could be studied in the history books, and morality insisted that theft accomplished through majority vote was still theft.

But bugger that. Politicians and voters basked in the discovery of an apparent perpetual motion machine. In the Walt Disney astonishing movie imagining of that machine, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," the apprentice engineers a watery inundation of the castle by a mighty host of broomsticks brought to life and equipped with water buckets. The apprentice loses control and disaster is averted only by the intervention of the sorcerer himself. That massive flood is, like, you know, our accumulating debt.

So who or what will play the part of sorcerer? Religious people have an obvious Answer and the rest of us will have to satisfy ourselves with the amorphous, one-size-fits-all "reality." That would be the reality that's out there like poison ivy in summer and frost in winter. That thing that chugs inexorably along on concepts like "what goes up must come down," "if it's too good to be true, it probably is," "there's no such thing as a free lunch," and "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction." That thing that the "we are as gods" crowd just will not take into account.

Socialism intoxicates by mixing political power, self interest, and greed. Liberals know only that the existence of an evil – or a mere inconvenience – on earth is only because mankind has simply failed to conceive of the idea that that evil or inconvenience should cease to exist. The failure to conceive of a solution to the ills of existence is a simple failure of imagination on the part of The Good People, or it is the manifestation of racism, capitalist greed, and misanthropy on the part of people who are evil.

People like Sarah Palin.

From the size of the debt and the slope of the curve over many decades we can deduce the Unshakeable Operating Principle of the Modern Day, which is that spending and debt must increase. Why dance around this fact? Not for nothing do the operatives speak of "third rails" in politics.

We -- and here I mean the entire Western world – acknowledge no limits. We live our lives, and doom our children to penury and decline, based on the Universal Precept, which is that if one French fry is good then 10 lbs. of French fries will be delicious. One Muslim immigrant is interesting. 20,000,000 must be bleeping fascinating.

So the only question is What form will the inevitable correction take? A modest session surfing the web today will reveal many speculations. One or more will prove to be accurate. "Steady as she goes" just isn't an option. But rest assured we will choose "steady as she goes."

So, we are about to live out the truth of Benjamin Franklin's observation:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

What do you call people who are willing to throw away something so superb as Constitutional government for no other reason than expediency?

Notes
^[1] "Our Current Time for Choosing." By Jon Huntsman, Wall Street Journal, 5/31/11 (subscription)(emphasis added).