The Flight from Consequences

I have long dismissed people whose logic is this: “Government is evil, it is doing all these evil things to us.”

The reason I do dismiss this idea is that “government” is people. People are doing whatever is done, whether you like it or not and until we, the people, take up the challenge to replace these people with other people who are better, smarter, and more moral, the status quo is the best we can expect.

In my opinion, what we have is worse than a communist state, it is a technocratic kakistocracy married to a scripted reality show. We have people in government who have no internal restraint, no sense (or a seriously warped sense) of honor, responsibility or duty and no conscience.

And I think we got where we are by two paths that culminate in the desire to do whatever we want without suffering the consequences.

To start with my explanation and before we get to government, I’ll state that I believe a large percentage of the problem is spiritual. I do think one of the least appreciated problems is hostility toward religion because traditional religion refuses to participate in humanity’s oldest fantasy: the belief that consequences can be permanently escaped.

And I use the term “traditional” because today’s religion is being turned into a version of the old Psychic Network where, for a small fee, you could call and talk with a “real” psychic who would tell you what you wanted to hear – or at least be so ambiguous about it that you believe it is what you wanted to hear.

But classical religious traditions, particularly those rooted in the Abrahamic faiths, insist that actions have consequences, that moral order is real, and that accountability cannot be fully outsourced. There is judgment. There is responsibility. There is the uncomfortable claim that reality itself possesses a moral structure in which justice and mercy coexist, but neither cancels the other. For someone whose deepest preference is to avoid the consequences of his actions, that claim is more than inconvenient. It is offensive.

Governments can be lobbied. Laws can be changed. Even our institutions can be pressured and through all of it, public opinion can shift. The divine offers no such negotiation. Serious religion rejects the notion that human beings can indefinitely transfer responsibility elsewhere. It insists that some debts must eventually be paid and some truths must eventually be faced.

What is often overlooked is that religion speaks not only of consequences but also of rewards. Honesty, courage, fidelity, discipline, restraint, and personal responsibility tend to produce benefits even in this life. They build trust, strengthen relationships, improve judgment, and create resilience. The religious claim is not that life is a simple ledger of punishments and rewards, it is that the universe is not indifferent to how we live. Actions ripple outward. Habits accumulate (good or bad) and character compounds over time.

That principle extends far beyond religion. It touches politics, culture, economics, and the way modern societies increasingly understand the role of government. My granddaddy always told me that all a man really has at the end, no matter what he has accumulated and accomplished is his reputation.

Human beings have always searched for ways to soften the connection between cause and effect. We deny responsibility, shift blame, rely on luck, invoke status, or seek protection from institutions willing to absorb risk on our behalf. The desire is universal. The methods simply change with time, and somewhere along the way, through a steady accumulation of crises, the expansion of the administrative state, and the weakening of families, churches, civic organizations, and other mediating institutions, government became the preferred mechanism for managing consequences. It did not happen all at once. It emerged gradually and often from genuinely compassionate motives.

What once fell to family, community, personal responsibility, market discipline, foresight, or simple acceptance of reality is now increasingly transferred upward. Floods, economic downturns, crime, health risks, personal failures, and even the outcomes of private decisions are frequently framed as problems government must cushion, insure against, regulate away, or redistribute.

The intention is usually noble. Most people want to reduce suffering. Yet noble intentions do not eliminate tradeoffs. The cumulative effect has been the creation of a society increasingly organized around externalizing costs while weakening the connection between choices and outcomes.

When individuals come to believe that someone else will absorb the consequences, agency begins to atrophy and moral hazard enters the chat.

Decisions become less consequential because a safety net is expected to catch the fall. Inaction becomes less costly because intervention is assumed to be inevitable. The expectation grows that every undesirable outcome must have a responsible authority somewhere who should have prevented it.

Even criminal behavior is filtered through layers of explanation while accountability becomes secondary. You may have seen the DSA chick who was justifying theft “because the person believed they needed” whatever it was that was stolen, harkening back to the seasons of “fiery, but mostly peaceful” BLM roving lootfests that were termed “reparations”.

Yet reality remains stubborn. Cause and effect survive every political fashion. No institution, regardless of its size or power, can permanently repeal them.

In many ways, the modern political impulse to insulate people from consequences is simply a secular version of the same temptation religion has always warned against. It is the hope that responsibility can be transferred indefinitely, that choices can be disconnected from outcomes, and that human beings can be protected not merely from hardship but from reality itself.

The alternative is not cruelty or indifference. It is the restoration of institutions that exist between the individual and the state: families, churches, communities, voluntary associations, local judgment, market feedback, and personal ownership of outcomes. These institutions are often imperfect, but they preserve the essential relationship between choice and consequence while providing support close to where problems occur.

Government has a legitimate role. It can punish wrongdoing, provide order, and mitigate certain risks but what it cannot do is abolish the structure of reality. Religion, at its best, has always understood this. It reminds us that consequences are not merely punishments but teachers, and that responsibility is not merely a burden but the foundation of freedom.

The same moral order that assigns consequences also offers redemption, restoration, and reward to those willing to confront reality rather than flee from it.