In a fascinating public melding of mindsets, the U.S. leftwing media and rightwing media have come together to denounce opposition to the $40 billion aid package that Congress is getting ready to approve for the Ukrainian government.
On the left, the Washington Post let loose with an extreme volley against what would seem to be a rather innocuous request by U.S. Senator Rand Paul. He simply asked if a provision could be added to the bill that would enable the U.S. Inspector General to monitor how all those billions of U.S.-taxpayer-provided dollars are being disbursed. What would be wrong with that?
But wow! You would have thought that Paul had suddenly joined the Russian army. In an overheated editorial that harkened back to the America First Committee, which reflected the overwhelming sentiment of the American people against entering World War II, the Post wanted to make it clear that it is fiercely opposed to “isolationism.”
Not to be outdone, the rightwing Wall Street Journal took Paul to task for his “delaying” tactic and, like the Post, it also criticized 68 Republican members of Congress who are opposing the $40 billion aid package. The Journal editorial board wanted to make it clear that it too opposed a “growing isolationism” in the GOP.
This melding of leftwing and rightwing mindsets might appear unusual to some people, but not to me as a libertarian. There is actually a logical consistency taking place here, one that goes to the heart of the welfare-warfare state way of life that both liberals (i.e., progressives) and conservatives long ago foisted upon our nation.
The welfare state, the economic-political system to which both the left and the right are deeply committed, is founded on the notion of coerced or mandatory charity. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Farm subsidies. Education grants. Welfare. It’s all based on the dual notion of reflecting America’s collective goodness and also making Americans into good people.
The welfare-state system uses the IRS to seize large portions of people’s income. There is nothing voluntary about this process. It is based entirely on force. If you fail to pay your income taxes, they will seize your property and sell it against your will. They might even put you in jail. If you resist arrest any of this with deadly force, they will kill you.
Then, the welfare bureaucracies go into action by distributing the money to worthy recipients. That’s what makes us all good people. The fact that we are all taxpayers in this process means that we are helping others with Social Security, Medicare, welfare, farm subsidies, food stamps, public housing, and the like. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the fact that we live in a country whose government officials have adopted the welfare-state way of life also reflects how good we are as a people.
In other words, Congress, the president, the IRS, and the welfare bureaucracies are all helping us get into Heaven.
The principle is no different with respect to that $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. The IRS seizes our money. Congress votes to send $40 billion of it to Ukrainian officials in the form of weaponry and cash. The Pentagon distributes the largess.
Voila! We are, once again, made into good people — well, except possibly those who object to all this. They might find some difficulty entering into Heaven for being selfish, greedy, and self-centered or for bringing up things like rising prices of food and gasoline owing to out-of-control federal spending and Federal Reserve monetary debauchery.
It’s that welfare-warfare mindset that has brought the left and right together in common cause with Ukraine. We are in this together, helping the Ukrainians through the plunderbund of the welfare-warfare state. I imagine that there must be some sort of collective soul that is also going to Heaven, given that both the left and the right so often extol how good “America” is for sending so much taxpayer-funded assistance to Ukraine.
What’s wrong with having an Inspector General monitor how all that money is being disbursed? After all, it is our money that has been taken from us and is now being sent thousands of miles away to be given to government officials who almost none of us know.
Well, if you have an Inspector General monitoring how the money is being disbursed, doesn’t that make it more difficult to distribute bribes to Ukrainian officials? After all, does anyone really think that officials in the one of the most corrupt regimes in the world are going to sacrifice the lives of their citizens for free in order to join an old Cold War dinosaur like NATO? What better way to bring them around to do the bidding of Pentagon officials in their effort to “degrade” Russia than to pay them multimillion-dollar cash bribes? Just ask all those Afghan warlords who were at the receiving end of those planeloads of U.S. taxpayer-funded cash that U.S. officials flew into Afghanistan at the beginning of the U.S. invasion of that country.
Every day I ask myself: How long are the American people going to put up with this liberal-conservative welfare-warfare state crud? How long are they going to continue letting themselves be fleeced by both the left and the right in the name of mandatory collective goodness? When will they finally come to the realization that they can get into Heaven without the crooked and corrupt welfare-warfare state that liberals and conservatives have foisted upon our nation? When will they join up with us libertarians to extricate our nation from the deep and dangerous (i.e. nuclear-war) morass into which both liberals and conservatives have plunged us?
