Personal responsibility

　
A few days ago I overheard an aquaintance telling someone that "I'm a Republican and we believe in personal responsibility". Well, I'm a Democrat and I do too. It is hard to argue with the idea of personal responsibility. Its kind of like trying to argue against apple pie or cute puppies. But he was referring to politics when he said that, so I thought I would take the idea of personal responsibility one step further.
We can all agree that taking personal responsibility is a moral thing to do. It is honorable to work hard. It is honorable to tell the truth and to abide by your personal committments. But how can we separate our personal responsibility from our responsibility as citizens of a state or a nation. After all, a state or nation is comprised of individuals. Can we do one thing in our personal lives and do another thing in our civic lives? Not unless we are hypocrits.
Over the last 20 or 30 years this country that we live in has gotten deep in debt. Much of the debt was private and much has been public. The private debt is being taken care of in the marketplace through a slowdown in the economy, bankruptcys, and lower asset prices. The public debt has not been addressed. And the issue of public debt is a large part of the political discussion nowadays.
The Republicans in particular are keen on this idea of reducing taxes and slashing government spending. They say that by reducing government and cutting taxes the economy will grow. Maybe the economy would grow if those things were done. But we've heard that line before. In fact for the last three decades the Republicans have promised to cut government spending and to lower our taxes. Well taxes have been reduced. But government spending did not go down. So we have a debt problem. We can cut the government if we choose but the debt will stay. We all approved this course of action by our vote or nonvotes. So the debt is ours.
Is personal responsiblity different from civic responsibility? If it is morally right to pay off our personal debts, why do we want to avoid our public debts. Why is raising taxes on ourselves to pay our debts such a difficult undertaking? It really shouldn't be all that hard for a moral and upright nation, suffused with the ideal of "personal responsibility", to dig deep and pay off our debts to ourselves and others. And think of what the world would think of us if we could be so righteous. Why they might even extend us more credit!