Concerns

Most of the time I don't mention politics or the current state of affairs in our beloved country but now I feel helpless! What has happened to us? A once proud nation is now experiencing an economic decline. A number of years ago economists forecast the change to a service economy. Well we are certainly getting there. Instead in leading the world in manufacturing goods, we can look forward to leading the world to providing services. Or to say it another way: experts at operating the drive-through windows. Look around you today. How many people do you know who are involved in making a tangible product? I would venture to say that most of your friends are in some form of service industry. Whether it is banking or health care or lawn service they are not creating products. Why is this a bad thing? Real wealth is in the tangible. Would you rather have a new sports car or a promissory note for one? The note is easily destroyed and has no utility. But the car is real and has utility. Why is this happening? I think it is because we have become a society of the "entitled". People seem to think they are entitled to a certain life-style whether they have worked to obtain it or not. Success, if measured by a certain life-style, is not achieved by hard work but simply by "being". If you feel entitled there is no reason to learn a skill to obtain a better job. Therefore, we have become less educated and less capable of difficult tasks. The majority of candidates for advanced degrees in our institutions of higher education are now foreigners. If this trend is not reversed we will continue our slide to the bottom of the industrial nations list. And we, the European immigrants of the past seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, who made this country great will be operating the drive-through windows at McDonalds serving the customers of Asian ancestry.