On Monday I was a guest at the Southland Chamber of Commerce luncheon, which featured a debate for the office of Illinois Treasurer between Robin Kelly and Dan Rutherford.
A great question came from the audience which highlights the difference between the candidates in this race, but also is a larger example of the problem that we have in America. At the end of the debate, a woman stood up expressing concern that Rutherford would consider cutting functions in the Treasurer’s office. What he actually said was that he would do a performance audit of all programs to make that decision, but was adamantly against growing services.
But back to the woman’s question/statement. She expressed concern that cutting programs like financial education would be harmful for young people, who need to learn about credit, debt, and savings.
Financial education is... well, education.
Learning about money – credit, debt, savings, investments, budgeting, really anything one needs to learn to be a responsible and functioning member of society – is truly important. But it is not the job of the State of Illinois to teach that. It is the job of the most intimate unit of government: the family.
While this doesn’t exactly qualify as a faithful reductio ad absurdum example, we can wonder if government is indeed responsible for educating young people on money matters, where does government’s responsibility end? Shall government be responsible for educating young people on matters of diet? How about on matters of God? Perhaps matters of personal relationships – should they be friends with the people they are friends with? Or more immediately, should you get up out of that chair or not? Shall we have a state Department of Everything, wherein you can get answers for anything at all you choose not to figure out for yourself?
Rutherford made a good point in his answer to this question. We can think up a hundred great-sounding programs and legislate them all into perpetual existence. But Illinois is $13 billion in the hole. As a parent, we teach our children to tie their shoes, brush their teeth, and bathe themselves at some point. We don’t expect that we’ll be helping them with this when they are 16 or 17 years old. As it relates to our national responsibility problem, we need to stop expecting someone else to do the things we are supposed to do. In time, this will reorder responsibilities among units of government and create a lasting and more free society.
