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Last Updated: Nov 14, 2008 - 12:49:26 PM |
You know you’re getting old when things pop into your mind that most people aren’t old enough to remember. It’s bad enough when you’re paying for two bags of groceries at Sam’s Club and it costs more than you paid for your first car; and I don’t mean a payment on your first car, I mean the whole thing. Now when I hear the Messiah talking about confiscating the profits of one group to give “rebates” to people who never paid any taxes to begin with, I keep remembering a fat little man pounding on a table with a shoe screaming, “Your own grandchildren will raise the red flag from the White House!” Then again, there’s that pesky ability to read a dictionary which tells me a rebate is “money returned because a payment exceeded the amount required, for example, a tax rebate.” At least our government is improving schools so efficiently many citizens aren’t plagued by that pesky reading ability anymore. Who says government doesn’t have any answers?
I didn’t really believe the little man with the shoe, but the current presidential campaign appears bent on making him into an anti-profit prophet. The undisguised nature of the Messiah’s gospel, “Punish the rich and reward the poor,” forgets to mention that if you look closely at what he’s proposing, if you have a job, you’re rich. Redistribution of wealth has been tried by every plunder empire that has ever existed and though it sounds great to begin with – “Let’s take their stuff!” – eventually it’s unsustainable because there’s no more plunder to redistribute.
Wait a minute! I thought this was supposed to be a capitalist system with a limited government. So where does all this governmental taking and giving come from anyhow? The United States has been waging a war on poverty since LBJ began channeling FDR. What’s the result? While the welfare state claims it will eliminate poverty through income transfers under other names, statistics tell another story. According to Walter Williams in 2005, total federal, state, and local government expenditures on 85 welfare programs were $620 billion, which is larger than defense ($495 billion) or public education ($472 billion). In 2005, there were 37 million official poor people. This works out to more than $16,750 per poor person and more than $67,000 for a family of four poor people, not including Social Security, Medicare, or private charity. If we’re spending more than enough to make all the poor people not poor, why are there still poor people? The answer is poor people aren’t receiving all the money. Non-poor people, I mean government bureaucrats or Commissars who distribute the redistribution, get most of it. This is sort of like welfare for the middle-class or a poverty program for the non-poor.
What are the real costs to us as individuals, to our society, and to the economy? The social costs include the destruction of the government’s credibility and the loss of liberty affects us all as individuals and as a society. Some economists estimate that the total cost to the economy may be as high as a 25% reduction in total GDP. One reality often forgotten is that for every benefit created, there’s a cost paid. The government can’t put one dollar in someone’s pocket without taking it out of someone else’s pocket. Those of us who receive the benefit may think of it as free, since we pay nothing for it, but just as sure as cows produce milk, it costs someone somewhere something.
Equality under the law and equal opportunity are the basis of a free society. However, the siren song of the redistributionist the equality of results is not only not compatible with a free society; it is instead the seedbed of tyranny.
This has got to stop! Someday as sure as night follows day, it will stop because it’s unsustainable. After all, the rich have been bled white; when there are more poor instead of less everyone will know the only ones benefiting are the people who decide who gets what. When there’s nothing left to steal, the whole rotten edifice will collapse in on itself. Do you remember the USSR? Am I showing my age again?
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