25 July 2012
By Jacob G. Hornberger Everywhere you look in both the welfare state and
the warfare state, you find massive failure. Social Security? Busted, like other Ponzi schemes.
There isn't a fund, and there never has been a fund.
It's a straight welfare program. Increasing taxes to
fund the program place an ever-growing burden on the
young. Medicare, Medicaid, and healthcare in general? A
total mess. Prices continue to soar and government
intervention continues to increase. The drug war? 60,000 dead in Mexico alone during
the last 6 years and no change in drug use or the
availability of drugs in the United States. Meanwhile,
all the adverse collateral effects of the drug war —
gangs, gang wars, political corruption, overcrowded
prisons, high jail sentences, racism, robberies, asset
forfeiture, thefts, muggings, and AIDs — continue to
grow. Public schooling? Not even the president of the
United States will dare subject his children to the
system. Coercion in education has done nothing to
inspire a love of learning and might well be a root
cause of drug use among the American people. Federal spending? Out of control. U.S. officials
continue to spend far more money than they are
bringing in with taxes. Their only solution to the
problem is to spend even more money to "stimulate the
economy" or to "tax the rich" to collect the
difference. Federal debt? Out of control too. To spend more
than the taxes they're collecting, U.S. officials
continue to borrow the difference, adding to the
enormous debt load of the federal government, for
which taxpayers are ultimately liable. Each time the
debt ceiling is raised, there are almost immediate
calls to raise it again. Paper money? Continual debasement, decade after
decade. Inflating the currency is nothing more than a
surreptitious, fraudulent means of taxing the
citizenry. Iraq and Afghanistan? Notwithstanding repeated
bromides about how the U.S. military invasions of
those countries have produced paradises of freedom,
prosperity, and harmony, such bromides are nothing but
delusions and lies. The best proof is that not one
single U.S. official and not one single American
citizen has taken his family to either of these two
countries for summer vacation. That's because both
places are absolute messes reeking of death,
destruction, tyranny, and corruption. Foreign aid? The U.S. government continues to
support brutal dictatorships with cash and armaments,
which are used to maintain the dictatorship's hold on
power, thereby engendering increasing levels of
anti-American anger and animosity. Egypt and Bahrain
are just two examples. Iran? The problems stretch all the way back to the
U.S. coup in 1953, by which U.S. officials
intentionally destroyed Iran's experiment with
democracy to install a brutal pro-U.S. dictator into
power. Libya? Interterventionism has not only left that
country a mess, it has also now engendered the horrors
currently being inflicted on the people of Mali by
Islamic extremists. The "war on terrorism"? Eleven years and counting.
Actually, endless in nature, given that U.S.
interventionism abroad gives rise to the anger and
hatred that manifests itself in anti-American
terrorism. The "war" has also enabled U.S. officials
to assume permanent emergency powers that characterize
dictatorial regimes, including military incarceration
of civilians without due process of law, torture, and
assassination. We are living in an age of perpetual crisis, chaos,
death, destruction, impoverishment, and loss of
liberty. That's because we're living under a welfare
state and a warfare state. Why in the world would any rational American want
to continue this aberrant system? It just makes no
sense at all. I think the best explanation for the continued
loyalty and allegiance to the welfare-warfare state
way of life is that since Americans have been born and
raised under this way of life, they think it's
permanent. Even worse, they've been inculcated with
the notion that all this statism is actually freedom.
They've convinced themselves that the troops in
Afghanistan and Iraq and abroad really are "defending
our freedoms here at home." All too many Americans have accepted the notion
that the welfare-warfare state is the permanent
foundation of American life and American freedom. Thus
many of them devote their lives to trying to make it
succeed with a never-ending array of reform proposals.
No matter how massive the failure, hope springs
eternal. People continue to hope that someone's reform
plan will finally bring success to Social Security,
healthcare, the drug war, federal spending and debt,
the dollar, Iraq, Afghanistan, the "war on terrorism,"
and the other countless other aspects of the
welfare-warfare state. It's never going to happen. Americans would be wise
to accept that fact sooner rather than later. That's
because the welfare state is not freedom and neither
is the warfare state. They both constitute statism,
pure and simple. And statism is not freedom. The good news is that if there is an alternative,
one involves abandoning, not reforming, the
welfare-state, warfare-state way of life. That
alternative is libertarianism. It's the only way to
restore a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious, free
society to our land. It only makes sense to embrace it
now rather than later. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the
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