Now imagine if you had dozens of parents and you had to get permission from all of them to do something. What a nightmare! Home life would slow down to a crawl in no time. From what I can see this is how socialism works. Great complicated Rube Goldberg-like government structures are created to channel the energies of a civilization to the desired goals of the state. Even though the individual theoretically can alter government at the ballot box, once socialism takes hold it rarely lets go.

I am a former Canadian resident now living in the U.S. With only about one tenth of the U.S. population, a back-of-the-envelope calculation would tell us that one vote in Canada would equate to about ten votes in the U.S. Then why, when I lived in Canada, did I never feel ten times as politically empowered as the average American voter? Looking southward it always seemed that Americans had more say in their future than Canadians did, that they were more in charge of their future than Canadians were. Fast-forwarding to today I'm not sure that's as true as it used to be, but as we witnessed our unprecedented increase in government spending, as we witness an unimaginably large deficit, and as we witness the government take over of our financial institutions, it seems we're creating the multiple sets of parents that I alluded to earlier.

Even more complex government structures will emerge to deal with current crises, dwarfing the ability of the average citizen to influence policy. Whether we admit it or not we have turned the corner to socialism, and whether we like it or not, the hardening of the arteries of our ability to effectuate change at the grass roots level has begun.

We abandoned the gold standard in 1973 and let our currency be determined by what others thought it was worth. Thus today we have floating exchange rates when there is no absolute standard to determine value. It seems our culture and values have followed suit. The rightness or wrongness of beliefs and actions is no longer based on the standard of accepted Judeo-Christian traditions but by ebb and flow of moral relativism.

What does this mean for us? It means a lot, especially for our young people. The world is complex enough without forcing them to navigate a minefield of negative cultural influences without guidance.

One of America’s strengths is its innovative spirit and its ability to move forward unencumbered by the past. This has worked well in business and politics, but not so well in culture and values. The truth is we need standards in our lives. It leads to the orderly progression of life. It’s hard to predict where the alternation of values will land. As an aging baby boomer, I’m not crazy about where the various revolutions in thought and behavior of the 1960s have led us. I can’t help but feel the angst and disconnectedness of our youth today started back then. Maybe we should be more careful when we tinker with the DNA of the values of our civilization.

Maybe the financial meltdown will give us pause to consider what a cultural meltdown might look like - if part of it hasn’t happened already. We altar our values at our peril.