A short paragraph in an editorial in today’s New York Times provides an excellent symptom of the cancer that infects the body politic in America. The editorial addresses Caroline Kennedy’s bid to replace Hillary Clinton as New York’s U.S. senator. The paragraph reads as follows:
“Another question being asked quietly among government and business types in New York is whether Ms. Kennedy has the legislative skills to help New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, and the rest of the state’s delegation, negotiate their state’s fair share of much-needed federal money in very difficult times.”
This type of thing has now become such an engrained feature of American political life that hardly anyone even bats an eyelash at the fact that it takes place. It’s just a given now that the federal government is the nation’s gigantic sugar daddy that has a large amount of candy at its disposal. Each state must do its best to elect congressmen and senators who are most adept at going to Washington and getting their fair share of the booty and bringing it home.
This evil, immoral, and corrupt process brings to mind Frédéric Bastiat’s famous dictum: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Here’s how the system works: Each taxpayer is required to pay a certain amount of his income to the Internal Revenue Service. If he refuses to do so, he is sent to a federal penitentiary.
That giant pool of money is then placed at the disposal of Congress. There is no defined rule as to how the money is going to be divided up, but this is where the deal-making comes in, or as the Times calls it, “negotiation.” Trades are made in which congressmen agree to support each other’s grants. The most effective congressmen, as the Times suggests, are those who are able to bring large percentages of the money home to their district.
Oftentimes success is measured by how much the people in a district send to the IRS compared to how much money their representatives and senators are able to bring to their home district. Of course, never mind that the money brought home usually goes to local politicians, contractors, grant recipients, and the like, rather than the taxpayers themselves. If a congressman brings back more than what the taxpayers paid, he is hailed as a great leader and is usually returned to office.
Meanwhile, everyone has come to view the federal government as his daddy or his god. Whenever there’s a problem, the instinct is to look immediately to daddy or god to give them money. Never mind that the money has been forcibly extracted from everyone else by the force of the IRS.
The irony is that it’s this corrupt system itself that is at the root of many of the economic woes that people are suffering. Yet people cannot bring themselves to confront and accept that because it’s too scary. It would be akin to a child’s confronting the possibility that his parents might not be able to take care of him. So, people instead blame their woes on “freedom and the free market” and continue to call on their daddy-god to send them money, blocking out of their minds that it’s just going to make matters worse.
What happens if demands on the federal largess exceed the amount of money the IRS is collecting? No problem. Our federal daddy-god just prints the money to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of his adult-children. Our daddy-god even openly and honestly admits that, as reflected in following subtitle in a front-page article in today’s New York Times: “Agency vows to print as much money as needed to thaw credit markets.”
Of course, never mind the monetary debasement that comes with printing money. People will just blame that on greedy businessmen and mysterious market conditions, not their daddy-god.
Our federal daddy-god also has made all sorts of promises to help people in the future. According a website called U.S. Budget Watch, the U.S. Treasury is reporting $56 trillion in unfunded government liabilities. $56 trillion! That’s a lot of promises and guarantees, which by the way must be funded by taxation or printing of money. Ultimately Americans are responsible for making good on those liabilities.
Meanwhile, the spending just goes on and on, conditions keep getting worse and worse, and people just continue asking their federal daddy-god for more financial help. People are fighting desperately to get their hands on a larger piece of the federal pie but, at the same time, doing their best to guard their own wealth from the IRS. People just keep assuming that their federal daddy-god is all powerful and all-wealthy and that the process can go on forever.
Ultimately something has to give, however, and the piper will have to be paid. When the day of reckoning arrives, we can only hope that Americans will finally realize that the real God (as compared to their federal daddy-god that has provided them with all those goodies in response to their woes) has created a consistent universe, one in which evil, immoral, and corrupt means are incapable of producing good results, not even when people obstinately refuse to acknowledge the evil, immorality, and corruption.
