In the United States, many of us have grown up within a culture that values our individualism and right to exercise personal choice. We need only cite our foundational document to justify that we have the “inalienable right” to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Obviously, in pursuit of each of our personal definitions of things like happiness, we make choices about what we feel, think, and believe are best. We have formed a culture where we operate under the idea that we are allowed to act as we please, so long as those actions don’t harm others. But what if our society’s current view of the term “harm” is far to narrow?
The “you do what’s right for you, I do what’s right for me” mantra necessitates a question though: “What if what’s right and best for you isn’t what’s right and best for our shared society and public bank account”? What if the private matter of individual choice about things like what we feed ourselves and what we do with our reproductive systems were as a matter of fact, public matters?
What I’m driving at is the degree to which we don’t realize the compounding effect of personal choices on public and societal good. Unfortunately, what we choose to do in respect to, for example, our bodies, impacts more than we realize. How much are our personal decisions being subsidized by the public’s taxes? How much will our generation cost society to subsidize our future heart disease treatment when we continue to form habits of eating poorly? How much do our personal choices cost when a poor decision leads to a new child’s life? Of course, studies show that this child will likely be born into poverty. A child’s life, by no fault of his or her own, that will likely have to be subsidized to even survive. Not encouragingly, the child born into this situation is shown to be extremely likely to repeat the cycle, continuing a destructive, saddening, and expensive pattern of personal choice.
So how have we as a society addressed this problem? Instead of investing into people such as these children through early-childhood education, which could better teach them to make wise reproductive and nutrition choices, we invest in things like incarcerating them repeatedly for minor drug possessions. We have decided we would rather subsidize the back end of this person’s life. We would rather finance expensive imprisonment than invest fewer funds earlier into high-quality public education that is shown to combat things like rates of drug use, unplanned pregnancies, and incarceration. According to the VERA Institute of Justice, in North Carolina, the state government spends an average of $29, 965 per year to house an inmate. All the while, the General Assembly has continued to cut education funding that combats these very same prison expenses. Our politicians cut public education funding this past year by “drain(ing) $500 million out of public education…and siphon(ing) $90 million out” and into “vouchers to be used at private schools,” according to NC Policy Watch. Additionally, innovative and proven programs such as Smart Start and NC Teaching Fellows have faced majors cuts and termination. When the math is done, things don’t logically add up.
We currently live in a state that continues to make ineffective public investments. Much worse than this, our state is sending a message to those in need that our society would rather pay more in the long run to punish them, than to invest in and help them now. Within our system, we are already paying to subsidize private choices through our taxes. I can only imagine the change this state and country would see if we began to finally make wise financial and social choices by investing our dollars sooner rather than later.