Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Privilege, Servitude, and the GOP Budget

Both houses of Congress passed budget blueprints designed to balance the federal budget in 10 years. The budget calls for a reduction in projected spending of 5.5 $trillion. Needless to say—and leaving aside the details of the budget—the Left is not happy with the budget, and offers the usual smear tactics, lies, and false generalities in rebuttal.

For example, the New Jersey Star-Ledger titles their rebuttal The GOP has spoken: The wealthy and powerful could use more help. What “help” they do not say. Nor can they, because the alleged “help” is really a modest reduction in the amount of money seized from the “wealthy” and redistributed to those who did not earn it. The Star-Ledger drivels:

The GOP-dominated House and Senate passed their budget resolutions last week, and in the process proved beyond reasonable doubt that the majority party is less interested in governing than in sending symbolic valentines to the wealthy.

As usual, this will lead to the same ideological war that consumes our politics, but this budget also represents a war against cognitive function, because only in the fantasies of ideologues can one expect to make $5 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years without raising any taxes.

Unless, of course, you do it by advancing a budget that promotes the existence of a privileged class and a servile class. [emphasis added]

The S-L goes on to bemoan proposed cuts in Food Stamps (more on that in my next post), Pell Grants, and Medicaid; repeal of ObamaCare “because anything that improves the lives of 16.4 million working people cannot possibly be a good thing”; “guts” Dodd-Frank (reduces regulation); and “doesn't create jobs, address infrastructure, raise the minimum wage, reduce college debt, promote scientific research, or deal with income inequality”: In other words, the GOP budget doesn’t do enough to advance the Left’s statist agenda. (For perspective, the GOP would actually increase annual spending from $3.8 trillion to $5.1 trillion, for a 10-year total of $43.2 trillion—a reduction of about 11% from current projections. Note also that, other than ObamaCare, no welfare programs are slated to be eliminated.)

I left these comments:

We already have “a privileged class and a servile class”: It’s called the regulatory welfare state.

The privileged are the political class, which has garnered enormous power to regulate and redistribute the wealth of the servile class—the self-reliant and the productive. The privileged class feeds off of the “needy and the poor,” an ever-expanding class of dependents feeding off of the loot collected from the ever-shrinking, ever-more-regulated servile class.

The sinister nature of the welfare state is not just that it rewards moochers, however. It’s not that simple. It’s that it drives decent people into dependency. The welfare state drives up the cost of goods and services, setting up a dynamic that makes government handouts “necessary.” The soaring cost of college, driven up by subsidies, grants, and easy-money loans, is a clear-cut example of this. Worse, the welfare state turns millions of self-reliant people into a hybrid monstrosity—a combination slave and parasite. E.G. Social Security, which taxes you all of your working life to support other people, and then leaving you with living off of the earnings of others as the only means of collecting your promised “earned benefits,” because your SS taxes were not invested in your name but spent. Welfare statists are not content to “help” the poor. If they actually did care, they’d be unrepentant free market capitalist “ideologues.” They’re not, because they love the poor. It’s the source of their power and their very reason for being. That’s why their actual goal is to relentlessly expand the ranks of the poor, until the vast, once self-reliant middle class is turned into a vast, dependent welfare class. It is a dependency society, not a self-reliant society, that is the ultimate goal of the power-lusting privileged class.

The regulatory welfare state is immoral at its core, because it is built on legalized looting and rights-violating regulations and fostered by envy and hatred of economic flourishing masquerading as “economic justice” and the phony problem of “income inequality.” The fact that there are beneficiaries such as the 16.4 million ObamaCare “insured” doesn’t mitigate this fact. Every tyranny has beneficiaries, including Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and socialist Venezuela. The ends don’t justify the means.

Unfortunately, the debate in Washington is only about the size of the welfare state, when we should be debating how best to least disruptively phase it out. That said, it’s laudable that the GOP is offering these cuts, even though their goal is to save and perpetuate the welfare state. Every dollar cut from the gargantuan federal budget is another dollar left in the hands of the people who earned it. Cutting spending wherever politically feasable is the right thing to do, albeit being only a small first step in the right direction.  

Related Reading:



The Evil Genius of the Welfare State

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