“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone.” — Frederic Bastiat
Americans struggle.
Cars, houses, spouses, kids, jobs, bosses, and debt, to name a few, but they all boil down to one struggle: money. Or better said, the absence of money. Not enough money to buy a car, to take the wife to dinner, to send the kids to private school, to quit the crappy job, to shop like it was a sport, to take a vacation from a soul-dead existence, to pay off the credit cards, and the list goes on and on.
Someone needs to take responsibility. Someone needs to end the struggle.
Angel Adams insists on it. Watch her here:
Someone needs to step up, Angel says as she gestures across a sea of children, all her own.
Someone. Anyone.
Anyone, that is, but Angel Adams.
And most Americans, after watching Angel’s story, will convict her, and criticize her for being a leech on government’s largesse. What they cannot see is themselves in that video. Unfortunate since most Americans are not much different than Angel Adams.
What Angel is willing to say openly and without shame is that she wants someone else to pay.
And, so do a majority of Americans. They want someone to put their thumb on the scale of the market and tip the balance in their favor. They want something for nothing.
Bastiat was right when he observed “government as the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” And, it is not just welfare recipients who can’t make the connection between kids with no shoes and lying on the their backs getting banged like a gong and ending up with 15 children.
Most Americans are—let me search for the word—freeloaders. And most of those deny it. Indeed, a 2008 poll found that 57% of Americans denied ever using a government program. But when shown a list of 21 actual programs, including student loans and home-mortgage interest deduction, 94% of the deniers turned out to have bellied up to the pork-bar after all.
Who are they? They are us.
They are current Social Security recipients who, under no theory, have paid in near enough to justify the benefits they are receiving in the mail each month.
It is a General Public filled with so much fear and hate that they can’t get enough of the engorged war machine that spends more on “defense,” more properly called “war,” than the next 16 largest nations combined.
It is funding for the arts which means funding artists who can’t sell their paintings or pottery or music in the free market.
It is parents who want public parks and museums to babysit their children.
It is Medicare recipients who want someone to pay for their overpriced sick care.
It is Section 8 housing recipients who get a check for rent for an unlimited amount of time with no work requirement.
Bottom line? An estimated 59% of the 308.7 million Americans in this country get at least one federal benefit, according to the Census Bureau. In 2009, an estimated 46.5 million received Social Security; 42.6 million got Medicare; 42.4 million were having doctor and hospital bills paid through Medicaid; 36.1 million get food stamps; 12.4 million enjoyed housing subsidies; and 3.2 million got Veterans’ benefits.
Others who find insufficient the benefits they can latch onto legally just game the system.
US households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes.
But before blaming it all on Angel Adams and the rest of the General Public who go to Disneyworld on food stamps, know that the hogs span every income level.
By Jim Karger
