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IN THE END,

WHO WILL BE LEFT TO SUPPORT

THE GOVERNMENT?

By Carroll Cox

America of 2001 is a welfare state, bearing little resemblance to the vision of an independent people with justice for all, under the severely limited government put in place by the founders of this nation.

You don't believe the United States is a welfare state? You decide.

Webster's New World Dictionary describes a welfare state as "a state in which the welfare of its citizens, with regard to employment, medical care, Social Security, etc. is considered to be the responsibility of government."

Those who still cling to the myth of a 'free' America may argue that we don't have socialized medicine and our taxes aren't nearly as high as European nations; therefore we are not a welfare state. I beg to differ.

Add up the taxes from many levels of government, sales taxes, permits, property taxes, regulation costs and hidden taxes that are difficult to nail and you may find the U.S. now has the highest cumulative tax costs in the world.

And we do have socialized medicine, as well as an expensive menu of other socialized benefits' a particularly selective and perverse type of social welfare. It provides for senior citizens and indigents while turning its back on those who feed it. European nations with high taxes dispense day care, national health care insurance for ALL, free or low-cost university FOR THOSE QUALIFIED and substantial pensions for ALL their people. In Italy, a premature baby with $1 million in health care costs, will be financed by the government no matter who the baby belongs to. In America, a million-dollar preemie will be financed by the government only if the mother is indigent or the parent works for some level of government. The indigent or government baby will be paid for with the tax dollars of an insurance company collecting ever rising premiums, taxpaying working families and uninsured working families whose own premature babies will put them in debt for the rest of their lives.

In fact, it is projected that within 10 years only four segments of American social welfare--Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and federal pensions' will consume 70 percent of federal revenues, currently over $2 trillion.

Martin Gross wrote in his book, A Call For Revolution, that the U.S. version of social welfare is not only ineffectual and wasteful, but geared to everyone EXCEPT THE WORKING CLASS (in the private sector).

(I am not advocating a welfare state of any kind; merely pointing out the differences between the selective American welfare state and the more general welfare state of other industrialized nations.)

For at least two decades, government has been the fastest-growing employment sector. At this time, while chaos reigns in the private sector, job security and benefits remain assured in the public sector.

In the two years since June, 1998, 638,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs paying between $35,000 and $60,000 annually) have been lost. Wal-Mart, with 885,000 U.S. jobs paying $15,000 to $20,000 a year has come to the rescue, along with other similar consumer-oriented multinationals paying low wages.

Former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss stated in 1991: "The middle-class in the country is in far worse shape than most people really have any idea. That's the big casino and that's what's going to change the course of the country."

Gross wrote that discretionary income in 1950 after taxes and mortgage was 80 percent of the average American's paycheck. By 1992, discretionary income (after taxes and mortgage) for the middle-class family had shrunk to 46 percent. The latest income data was published in the Arizona Republic of May 31, 2001. It showed that the portion of taxes paid by the wealthiest one percent of Americans grew from 15.5 perecent in 1979 to 23 percent in 1997. During the same period, after-tax income of the richest one percent grew from $263,700 to $677,900, a 157 percent increase. The lowest-earning one-fifth of Americans after-tax income dropped from $10,900 to $10,800. That means that approximately 56 million Americans have an income of $10,800 or less, after almost 20 years of "progressive programs." Another 56 million Americans (the middle one-fifth), since 1979, improved their lifestyles from $33,800 to $37,200, a gain of ten perecent in income, which doesn't account for rising education, insurance, utility, taxes and many other costs.

The Congressional Budget Office reports that distribution of income grew substantially more unequal during the last decade. "Gaps (in the U.S.) between rich and poor, and rich and middle-class are the widest on record."

The portion of federal tax revenues paid by U.S. corporations, which once basically supported the U.S. Government, has shrunk to 10 percent. Today, the federal government's huge revenues are derived primarily by (1) individual income taxes and (2) employment taxes.

In his book, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, William Greider tells the effect of American corporations which have been downsizing for decades. "The effect of American companies becoming international, says Greider, is to reduce workers and communities to the lowest common denominators, mere bargaining assets to be collected or cast off, whichever happens to be expedient in a One-World economic game ruled by a handful of government and multinational figures, whose loyalty is to power and profits, not to individuals, communities, or even nations. The effect of this global process has a disintegrating effect on communities," according to Greider. As multinational empires, with the tacit backing of governments, controlling everything from food to fax machines and funds manipulate, merge and form even larger and more powerful alliances, the social and ultimately the economic costs of breaking family and community links are ignored or forgotten. Morris says 'free trade' as it is preached and practiced today is an "ideological package that promotes ruinous policies; particularly in a nation founded on concepts of individual liberty, self-reliance and limited government intrusion. Our headlong race down the road to giantism, globalism and dependence, he warns, make it harder and harder to back up and take another direction. If we lose our skills, our productive base, our cultures, our traditions, our natural resources; if we erode the bonds of personal and familial responsibility, it becomes ever more difficult to recreate community."

Greider wrote his book a decade ago. Today, the destruction of communities and rural life is almost complete. Local farmers and small business people the world over cannot compete with multinational production flooding the world market. Multinational corporations themselves continually merge, attempting to corner an ever larger share of the global market.

Small towns built by independent property owners have become strip malls controlled by global empires, and nests of swarming government bees with huge budgets buzzing over their kingdoms of zoning and permits and licensing.

These obstructions, though often well-meaning, said Edward Opitz, of the Foundation for Economic Freedom, are in the end counterproductive. "The welfare state never helps the poor in the long run," he says. "Its stifling net of regulations, controls and obstructions hurts the poor and lower earners disproportionately by diminishing individual productivity and reducing the nation's overall prosperity. It severely handicaps those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder and puts obstacles in the way of those genuinely seeking to improve themselves."

On the other hand, Opitz claims, the welfare state creates a relatively secure eminence for those who have already made it to or toward the top, and the opportunists who crave the security provided by endless government programs.

Albert Jay Nock, a constitutional scholar, writer and historian who died in 1945, said there are two political institutions, not just one. They are Government and State.

Nock wrote: "When the law maximizes everyone's opportunity to pursue his personal goals, then you have Government, an instrument of justice and a necessary component of a free society. But when the law is perverted so as to legally disadvantage some for the benefit of others, you have the State--the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent people. A State's legal apparatus is perverted, forever seeking out the means of its own support and finding it in the form of interest groups yearning for special privilege."

Today the premise of the welfare state has become so entrenched that it is possible that the majority of American citizens sincerely believe that government exists solely to solve each and every personal, business and social problem experienced by human beings. The irony is that these same citizens probably consider their country 'free'.

The road our country is traveling today has detoured far from its unique Constitution, with the concepts of limited government and maximum individual responsibility our nation's founders bequeathed us. They were students of the past and only too well aware that every great civilization in history has ultimately collapsed under the weight of government.

Today one-sixth of working Americans are employed by government. 60 percent of American households are totally or partially dependent on some form of government paycheck! In countless broken rural counties across the nation, government is the largest employer. Writing in U.S. News and World Report (5/7/01), Jeff Glasser said: "The degeneration of rural life has not seeped into the consciousness of urban America."

Expounding on Glasser's statement, I can add that also what has not seeped into the consciousness of urban America is that the grossly undervalued efforts of rural America (and equally undervalued rural economies the world over) are the ultimate source of all urban life-support---food, clothing, technology, utilities, transportation, shelter). After production comes manufacturing. The necessity of each has not yet 'seeped into the consciousness' of our 'silly society' spokespeople who, offering little of real value to humanity themselves, simultaneously downgrade the fundamentals of life and all true wealth creation, and are sustained by them.

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

As Opitz observed: "The State is an efficient instrument for stratifying society and for syphoning goods away from those who produce them into the hands of the elite who operate the system; it has no other function."

Our Founders gave us a document devised to steer us away from the destructive (and ultimately unsustainable) course of welfare statism. Their conceit was in hoping that they could outsmart human nature and history.

Long ago, former president Grover Cleveland asked a rhetorical question:

"If the government supports the people," he mused, "then in the end, who will be left to support the government?"

We shall see.

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