I recently heard that more Americans than ever are receiving government aid. How's that for a gentle euphemism? What it should read is that more Americans than ever are living off the labor of fewer Americans than ever.
Newsflash: It's not government aid. It's welfare. But "welfare" is itself little more than a euphemism for good old fashioned redistribution, the kind promoted by such visionaries as Lenin and Mao.
Before you suggest that Lenin and Mao had ideas that looked good on paper (as most ignorant people state when they describe communism), look at what their ideas brought to this earth: the most repressive, depressive, and aggressive governments ever established. Stalin followed Lenin, and Stalin made Hitler look like Mr. Rogers.
I thought that the 13th Amendment settled the issue of people living off of others' work. Such is called slavery, and the idea that anyone is due another's property without compensation is more akin to slavery than a mere analogy.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are becoming slaves to the state. The U.S. government earns no money. What it pays it takes from its productive people. It does not ask for their productivity. It takes it.
We are becoming a country of slaves. Maybe now you'll read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.
Read it. Think about the news.
The men and women in Washington are either in on the scam (e.g. Pelosi) or too damn stupid to get it. Dr. Ron Paul may be the only exception. You can infer this merely by how disliked he is amongst his congressional peers.
It's nearing time to side not with he who promises to fix the system but with he who promises to bring down the system.
I never thought of applying the 13th Amendment to welfare. Interesting, but too bad the Supreme Court (appointed by presidents committed to maintaining the welfare system)would not agree with you.
ReplyDeleteI just wish there was a way to fix this mess. Is there one?
ReplyDeleteThe obvious response is that capitalism (or corporatism) is as rampant a slave-maker as statism, only we stand in thrall to other citizens. Oh, wait...that's actually more like slavery...
ReplyDeleteI suppose the actual scenario is this--the unworked live off the leisure class, who live off the overworked. Who generally live in Indochina.
@ Anonymous
ReplyDeleteWhat you call corporatism is probably closer to mercantilism than capitalism. We're far more mercantilist these days than capitalist, and that is unfortunate. A free market rewards the productive. That's a good thing. Should a person amass enough capital to enter your so-called "leisure class," then his resources supply sustenance to many who would otherwise have no employment. For the unskilled, a crummy job is better than no job.
You're not actually bringing up some kind of class-warfare scenario, are you? Care to throw out some dialectical materialism while you're at it?
My rudimentary ability to trace exploitation hardly makes me a Marxist. I was only challenging your analogy that taxation for welfare is a kind of slavery.
ReplyDeleteI do think true classical liberalism is unrealistic, however; supposing everyone started out equal, the "productive" (or lucky, or fiendish, or...) will soon have amassed wealth, which translates into power. They then use that power to implement protectionist programs in their favor. At which point we're no longer dealing with capitalism--it begins to resemble, as you suggest, Mercantilism.
The antidote would be an educated, informed, dispassionate electorate to prevent this kind of transgression, but I won't be holding my breath. Economics really is the Dismal Science...
@ Anonymous:
ReplyDelete"The antidote would be an educated, informed, dispassionate electorate to prevent this kind of transgression, but I won't be holding my breath."
Nor will I.