The key to living well is balance. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about personal nutrition or the economy.  Hydration is good… but even too much water can kill you.  Capitalism is good… but greed and excessive materialism can kill a society.

Beware of extremes for they are found at the dead end of roads leading to destruction.

Having said that, and not to mix metaphors, the voices clamoring for the end of capitalism are mistakenly trying to throw the baby out with the bath water.  It isn’t capitalism that has brought us to the economic morass in which we now find ourselves. Capitalism, like the internet and guns, is content neutral.  By that I mean none of those have any effect until humans decide how to use and/or apply them.

It has been the evolution of capitalism, lacking necessary ethical and moral underpinnings, that has caused the system to rampage so out of balance as to bring the Republic to the brink of economic collapse. The insatiable and unchecked desire to acquire more money, power and material possessions has fueled the engine of unlimited spending and the corresponding accumulation of obscene debt.

It’s a critical moment.  The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the system rather than examine the motives and actions of the people who ran it.  To do the latter means to take a long, hard look at ourselves, our priorities and what we value.  To not take such a look, and thereby bring the system back into balance, is to abdicate responsibility for the inevitable and tragic end to the most remarkable experiment in personal liberty and freedom ever attempted on planet Earth.

A Republic such as that established by the U.S. Constitution combined with free market enterprise is a brilliant construct if accompanied, and therefore balanced, by such values as compassion, integrity, moderation, charity and personal responsibility.

Without that balance, the abyss is but a few steps away from where we now stand.

In your own life, immediately take charge of your personal decisions and re-balance your priorities.  Reevaluate what you value and be determined to stand up for those things you know to originate from your highest self.

At some point in that process, when enough of us take this approach, we will reach the tipping point that establishes a more holistic and supportive existence… and escape the need to destroy all that is good for lack of balance.

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