1) Lack Of Personal Responsibility: As a society, we encourage a "victimhood mentality" and an overweening government that never met an issue it didn't want to dive into with both feet; so we shouldn't be surprised that so many Americans expect to be rewarded for failure.

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If GM fails, we've got to step in and keep it afloat. If people snuck into this country illegally, we can't be so hardhearted as to obey the law and deport them! If you bought a house you couldn't afford, you shouldn't be penalized for that when the market takes a bad turn. If you bought a blender, tried to start it in your bathtub, and were nearly electrocuted -- that's not your fault! The manufacturers should have put a warning sticker on it.

We're descended from pioneer stock. Our ancestors explored, conquered, and tamed a continent. They couldn't rely on the police to show up if an Indian raiding party showed up at their isolated cabin at 3 AM. There was no school lunch program on the Oregon Trail. If your buggy whip company was going out of business because of those new fangled auto-mo-biles, you didn't get 20 billion dollars in taxpayer money so you could open up a new branch in China, you went out of business. If our ancestors were alive, they would sneer in disdain at what a nation full of whining babies their descendants have become.

2) Short Attention Spans: Perhaps because of the internet, the stunning variety of news sources, or the complexity of modern society, we've become much less able as a people to follow logical arguments and deal with complex messages.

This has bled over into Congress where they write legislation dealing with issues they don't truly understand. That legislation is voted on by legislators who admit that they haven’t read it and it affects the lives of millions of people who were unaware that such legislation was even being contemplated.

The problem with this is that there are many issues in life that are too knotty to be broken down into a soundbite or a 30 second commercial. Those affairs require more extensive knowledge and deeper thought and consideration than can be placed on a bumper sticker or weaved into a music video. When we lose sight of that fact, utter disasters that have been in plain sight all along for anyone with an attention span longer than five minutes can blindside much of the population.

3) Excessive Self-Esteem: Perhaps because we've spent decades trying to pump up the self-esteem of children in our public schools, irregardless of whether they've done anything to merit it, we have legions of people in our society who have an excessive level of confidence in their beliefs and abilities.

They're just so darn sure that what they believe is right just by virtue of the fact they believe it. Traditions? Codes of conduct? Religious beliefs? Customs? There's no need to even understand why previous generations believed what they did or to question what purpose it served. Just remember that they were racist back then and so they couldn't have had any good ideas.

Of course, we don't look back and say, "Gee? How did they make it without welfare, social security, or an income tax? Why is it that they had a divorce rate that was a fraction of the one we had today? How is it that the crime rate was so much lower? What made the people so much more polite than they are today? If we were in the same situation as the Founding Fathers, could our political leaders step up to the plate and do as well?"

Because we have forgotten the mistakes that convinced our forefathers to adopt the policies and mores that they did, in our ignorance we will be doomed to make many of those same mistakes again.

4) Short Term Thinking/Instant Gratification: Thomas Sowell once said that killing the goose that laid the golden egg can be a viable election strategy as long as it doesn't die until you're out of office and no one finds your prints on the murder weapon.

That is played out in American politics on a daily basis where few politicians think farther ahead than the next election. Time and time again, we have politicians advocating policies that either bring immediate benefits or avoid short-term pain, but are extremely harmful to the country over the long-term. Continued...