Outside The Box

“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” — Judges 21:25

Modern education has drifted from the classics, yet few works sit closer to the core of Western civilization than the Bible. Beyond its religious weight, it’s a study in human nature — and one of its recurring stories mirrors our own moment.

When the Hebrews left Egypt, they were led directly by the Creator — a pure theocracy. Even after settling in their Promised Land, they still saw God as their king. Human authority was local and temporary, guided by divinely inspired law. Judges appeared only when needed.

For three centuries, the same cycle repeated: the people drifted, foreign nations attacked, a judge rose to rescue them, peace returned — until the judge died and the cycle began again.

By Samuel’s time, the pattern was breaking down. Samuel was old, his sons corrupt, the Philistines threatening. The people demanded a king. Samuel took it personally, but God corrected him: “They have rejected Me as their king.”

Remove God from the equation — as much of the modern world has — and the pattern still repeats. Humans build systems that work. Over time, people abandon the principles that made them work. Enough individuals learn how to game the system, and it begins to fail. Younger generations reject it outright. The house divides, and collapse follows.

Every generation reenacts this drama. Our great‑grandparents blamed monarchies for WWI. Our grandparents blamed their parents for WWII, then built unprecedented prosperity. Their children — the Baby Boomers — inherited that prosperity but blamed their parents for Vietnam, inflation, and the energy crises of the 1970s.

Today’s youngest generations blame the Boomers for borrowing from the future and creating an economy where a hamburger costs $15 and homeownership feels out of reach. From 1981 to today, the national debt exploded from under $1 trillion to over $39 trillion — almost entirely during the decades when Boomers dominated political and economic leadership. Many who never saw affordable assets are ready to abandon the entire system and the cultural heritage that once allowed it to thrive.

This is the danger point. It’s easier to reject a system than to understand how it was gamed. Capitalism — much maligned by those who depend on it — consistently creates the most prosperity for the most people. Crony capitalism, however, deserves most of the criticism aimed at capitalism itself.

Meanwhile, communism and socialism are always ready to capitalize on dissent, despite having no track record of success. The USSR and Nazi Germany both used the word “socialist,” though their systems were wildly different. But their overlap — state ownership, central planning, suppression of dissent — explains their failures. These systems run against human nature.

Slowly, and then all at once, the gaming of our own system has brought us to another critical juncture. Empires don’t begin with debt, but they almost always end with it. Our government learned to spend without restraint, borrow from future generations, and devalue the currency to keep the game going. The bills are coming due. The outrage and division are symptoms. No egalitarian society survives without a healthy economy.

So when a young person says everything is too expensive and no job offers the security their parents enjoyed, I’m not going to tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Those bootstraps are frayed. That job may not exist. But I will tell them that communism, socialism, collectivism — whatever label they choose — will not solve the problems that pain them.

The last two years have brought improvements: a rebounding economy, onshored business, historic lows in crime. But spending continues unabated, and no political party has a remedy for that. Can we grow our way out of debt and devaluation? I don’t know. Economists don’t agree. It may not be mathematically possible without an uncomfortable reset — and our national tolerance for discomfort has rarely been lower.