http://www.garynorth.com/public/13371.cfm
Quote:
There is an international alliance between the bastard children of the welfare state and the self-made bastards who designed the welfare state and then sold it to the voters, beginning in the French Revolution. The alliance rests on a crucial two-part idea: the moral legitimacy and economic efficacy of central economic planning.
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What bothers Leftists today is this. Their programs of wealth confiscation in the name of the poor have produced the obvious result: single welfare mothers who have numerous children, because they know that they can get state and federal money when they have these children. Welfare mothers are not stupid. They are milking the system. The Leftists are appalled by the outcome of their policies. They find, lo and behold, that when the state subsidizes poverty, we get more poverty. The free market responds to incentives. Will wonders never cease?
So, they are schizophrenic. They have always been schizophrenic. On the one hand, they justify taxing the middle-class to finance the poor. They also make certain that their own tax advantages keep them from being taxed as heavily as the middle class. Then they are trapped. Red ink overwhelms national governments. The politicians need to have workers to support the welfare state, but the bastard adult children of the single mothers, who have grown up under the tender mercies of the welfare state's bureaucracies, don't want to work. They want to stay on the dole. Where are the central planners going to find productive citizens who will be capable of paying the taxes to support the present welfare state recipients? This includes a vast and growing army of old people, who are about to tap into the biggest welfare state operations in the history of mankind. It's tough to be a Leftist.
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Way to look at things, made me think about some things I did not thought out to the end before, not having been too interested in these details so far.
However, 7 billion people on the globe is always too many, no matter how you look at it. And if man does not find a way to take care of this, than nature's ways will - without any sentimental scruples man is so proud to have.
I note that a slowly increasing number of people seem to draw the consequences I have drawn in my life: not to live at the cost of the system/society and refusing its offered services as far as it does not force us to accept them by law and sanctions (for example it is punishable in Germany now not to have a health insurance), but also refusing to actively help or work for the support of this system and its corrupted policies and rotten schemes. Consider it to be an unlimited strike, not much different from the kind of strike Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged. Becasue the more you would be willing to do in order to aid the system and the wellfare regime, the more you get abused and your aid gets expoected from you and taken for granted. Your own ideals and standards get turned against you, and get turned into a tool of exploiting you. What does it tell about you if you allow that to be done to you without you resisting?
Don't try to be a good human saving the world, for the road to hell is plastered with good intentions. Just try to be a reasonable human. I promise you that most peope will achieve much more sustaining success by doing so, than all those do-gooders and central planners with oh so ambitious ideals and loud Hoorays written on their flags.
For as Mises already said: its not societies or states acting and deciding - but individuals.