Think carefully before demanding that the government take up your cause

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"The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forebears
that instead of regarding government with apprehension,
he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent,

concerned only with protecting him and helping him."

- George Reisman

Human nature being what it is, no government in history has ever been able to live up to the expectations that the current generation of Americans has for our government, and no government is ever likely to.

The government cannot take up your cause without oppressing those who do not embrace that cause.  If you're okay with that, then you are the reason our forebears regarded government with apprehension.  Modern government is full of people like you -- fine with the idea of oppression, as long as the oppressors are your fellow ideological tribespeople.

Another grim milestone for federal spending

Total federal spending has consistently outpaced tax receipts for so long that to even raise the point tends to elicit yawns. 

However, as the Weekly Standard reports today, this year brings us to a milestone without precedent:

We have now gotten to the point — as I noted yesterday — where if national defense, interstate highways, national parks, homeland security, and all other discretionary programs somehow became absolutely free, we’d still have a budget deficit. The White House Office of Management and Budget projects that in the current fiscal year (2011), mandatory spending alone will exceed all federal receipts. So even if we didn’t spend a single cent on discretionary programs, we still wouldn’t be able to balance our budget this year — let alone pay off any of the $14 trillion in debt that we have already accumulated.

Just an Olympiad ago, in 2007, the picture was quite different. In fact, in that year, federal revenues not only exceeded mandatory spending, but they exceeded it by more than $1 trillion ($1.117 trillion, to be more exact). The next year, 2008, during which the gap fell to a still-huge $914 billion, the Bush administration released a report issuing a rather dire warning (p. 25).  The report said that, “if left unchanged, mandatory spending alone is projected to exceed total projected Government receipts in approximately 50 years.”  That dire prediction has now come true — about 50 years earlier than projected.

This bears repeating: Even if we brought discretionary spending to $0.00 this year, there still would not be enough tax receipts to fund the mandatory (in other words, entitlement, or wealth-transfer) spending programs.

This problem goes much, much deeper than the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.  As Kevin D. Williamson observed in NRO on March 14, there aren’t enough millionaires out there to balance the budget.  Even if  all of the income of “the rich” was simply confiscated, the debt would continue to grow.

The Bush administration might be forgiven for being so far off on its projection… truly, this country has never before seen anything like the profligacy of this administration and its allies in Congress.

Quick Quote: Benjamin Franklin on the War on Poverty

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

-- Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766

Read the rest here.  Franklin appears to be of the opinion that we shouldn’t allow the social “safety net” to become a hammock.

Quick Quote: James Madison on the federal leviathan

“It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

— James Madison, The Federalist #62

Quick Quote: Frédéric Bastiat on wealth redistribution

There’s an abundance of data supporting this from the experience of Communist societies, but certain western academics and politicians remain convinced that the problem resides in the execution of the philosophy, not in the philosophy itself.

If it were to be asserted on principle, admitted in practice, sanctioned by law, that every man has a right to the property of another, the gift would have no merit—charity and gratitude would be no longer virtues. Besides, such a doctrine would suddenly and universally arrest labor and production, as severe cold congeals water and suspends animation; for who would work if there was no longer to be any connection between labor and the satisfying of our wants?

-- Frédéric Bastiat, Essays on Political Economy

Feel free to draw your own applications to the financially destructive, liberty-smothering health care boondoggle that just passed.

Rendell: Do your patriotic duty by going on food stamps

Here's one for the Newspeak dictionary. Food stamps aren't welfare, they're economic stimulus. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 12:

To those hurt by the recession but too proud to seek government help, Gov. Ed Rendell says: If not for yourself, do it for your country.
He urged people to view food stamps not as welfare, but as economic stimulus.
"Think of it this way: If you avail yourself of these sources of government relief, you'll have money to spend in the economy, and that's exactly what we need to reboot the economy," Rendell said Wednesday at Brashear High School in Beechview.

Quick Quote: You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anyone anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

-- Dr. Adrian Rogers (1931-2005), Southern Baptist preacher