High Ideals

In going through my bookmarks, I found this one about sustainable consumption which asks, ""How do we create a society that does not steal from the future?"

It's a good question, but one that is probably unattainable so long as people are free and selfish. I'd say a good first step would be to abolish the welfare state and social security. Groups like this tend to end up using idealistic goals as a lever to add to the power of governments, and that certainly doesn't create a "society that doesn't steal from the future." Democracies have the built-in tendency to create entitlements, because sooner or later politicians will happen upon the idea of buying votes with tax revenues, and that leads to borrowing (stealing?) from the future to fund benefits to the present generation.

The founders of this nation understood this principle, and they tried to place limits on federal power, but they made one big error. They created a federal judiciary that, once appointed, is unanswerable to anyone except higher courts, and they made the Constitution too difficult to amend, at least with 50 states and scattered populations as we have today.