Eventually, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did much to increase the national debt. Diminished tax revenues caused by an economy in recession also did their part, as did bailouts for the banking and auto industries to prevent them from collapsing at the beginning of that same recession. So did an emergency stimulus package to inject new (but temporary) life into the downturned economy. Entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security — do nothing to help matters, either.

Since Barack Obama took office as president, the national debt has increased by almost $6 trillion. During President George W. Bush’s time in office the national debt increased by more than $5 trillion. In amassing for us and our posterity such large financial obligations, the programs mentioned above give higher priority to the personal benefit of individuals than they do to the health of the United States of America.

I used to think this crisis of debt, along with all the other misguided policy initiatives, stemmed from a failure of Americans to follow President John F. Kennedy’s exhortation, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Put in the language of one Anti-Federalist contributor — probably Robert Yates of New York, writing as “Brutus” — to the constitutional ratification debates in 1787, “The object of every free government is the public good, and all lesser interests yield to it. That of every tyrannical government, is the happiness and aggrandisement of one, or a few, and to this the public felicity, and every other interest must submit.”

The problem, however, is misunderstanding of what “country” actually is.

Citizens of republics direct their patriotism toward the republic that existed before them and, if they are good stewards of it, will exist after them. Citizens of democracies direct their patriotism toward their country’s citizens. The United States is a republic, and the country of the United States is composed of the institutions of its constitution and the understandings in which those institutions and that constitution were formed. The United States does not consist of the people who live in it or pay taxes to its government; they are mere biological organisms that live and die. And although the United States is nothing without its citizens, the people who live within its boundaries are not Americans without the United States’ institutions.

Politics and government should deal with the ties that hold people together, not the people themselves. Indeed, politicians should act in the same way that chemists concern themselves not with alchemy, trying to convert one element into another, but with discovery of new elements and ways in which elements bind to one another in their various permutations.

An analogy aptly articulates my argument.

Consider an apartment building. This apartment building represents all of society. Each member of society owns a unit in the building. For the same purposes as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 gathered — “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” — the inhabitants of the apartment create a government for it.

That government ought to confine itself to maintaining the building’s exterior walls, the walls between the units that separate the private lives of the people who live in it, and the spaces in which the inhabitants have an opportunity to interact with one another — hallways, elevators, stairwells, laundry rooms, etc.

Whatever goes on within individual units and does not threaten to affect the spaces between the units, should be of no concern to the building’s government. Whatever threatens to affect those spaces — say, a fire — deserves the government’s attention, but unless it actually does damage to those meeting points, the government should not act.

It may be nice or moral or ethical for the individual inhabitants to come to the aid of their neighbor, but personal, private assistance is something a government — which uses force to carry out its judgments — should never pursue.

An adage often repeated to children is some variation on the maxim, “Just because everybody does it, doesn’t mean it’s right, and just because nobody does it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” Politics and government should operate on the same basic principle. The fact that a problem is common — that many people have the same problem — does not mean the problem is held in common. The grass between the houses of Boston and the streets of Boston might be equal in size to that of the Boston Common, but that does not mean the city’s residents have just as much right to spend their leisure hours in your front yard as they do in the country’s oldest public space.

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Michael Belding is a graduate student in history from Story City, Iowa.