via eMail from: Frank Buzzard Walt Williams makes a compelling argument that our government is forcing us to help others and its implications. Great article. Worth a read. Evil Concealed By Money Evil acts can be given an aura of moral legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic expressions such as spreading the wealth, income redistribution or caring for the less fortunate. Let's think about socialism. Imagine there's an elderly widow down the street from you. She has neither the strength to mow her lawn nor enough money to hire someone to do it. Here's my question to you that I'm almost afraid for the answer: Would you support a government mandate that forces one of your neighbors to mow the lady's lawn each week? If he failed to follow the government orders, would you approve of some kind of punishment ranging from house arrest and fines to imprisonment? I'm hoping that the average American would condemn such a government mandate because it would be a form of slavery, the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another. Would there be the same condemnation if instead of the government forcing your neighbor to physically mow the widow's lawn, the government forced him to give the lady $40 of his weekly earnings? That way the widow could hire someone to mow her lawn. I'd say that there is little difference between the mandates. While the mandate's mechanism differs, it is nonetheless the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another. Probably most Americans would have a clearer conscience if all the neighbors were forced to put money in a government pot and a government agency would send the widow a weekly sum of $40 to hire someone to mow her lawn. This mechanism makes the particular victim invisible but it still boils down to one person being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another. Putting the money into a government pot makes palatable acts that would otherwise be deemed morally offensive. This is why socialism is evil. It employs evil means, coercion or taking the property of one person, to accomplish good ends, helping one's fellow man. Helping one's fellow man in need, by reaching into one's own pockets, is a laudable and praiseworthy goal. Doing the same through coercion and reaching into another's pockets has no redeeming features and is worthy of condemnation. Some people might contend that we are a democracy where the majority agrees to the forcible use of one person for the good of another. But does a majority consensus confer morality to an act that would otherwise be deemed as immoral? In other words, if a majority of the widow's neighbors voted to force one neighbor to mow her law, would that make it moral? I don't believe any moral case can be made for the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another. But that conclusion is not nearly as important as the fact that so many of my fellow Americans give wide support to using people. I would like to think it is because they haven't considered that more than $2 trillion of the over $3 trillion federal budget represents Americans using one another. Of course, they might consider it compensatory justice. For example, one American might think, "Farmers get Congress to use me to serve the needs of some farmers. I'm going to get Congress to use someone else to serve my needs by subsidizing my child's college education." The bottom line is that we've become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." Tragically, today's Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail. Gerry Neys retort: If you carry the argument to its ultimate conclusion, any disaster aid, public housing or even all veterans programs would fall under his proscription (David Chu and AEI fellow Shirley Williams certainly appear to believe so of the latter). It's very easy to set up a straw man to make a point. The basic idea of a government is to handle problems and tasks beyond the scope of a single individual. The difficulty has always been where to draw the line. Just check out the two Books of Chronicles in the Bible. A constant refrain is that a man should have some peace under his own vine and fig tree without the current king making his life more difficult. Close to 50 years ago before religious/moral issues caused her to leave the Democratic Party, my mother once pinpointed the problem saying that "Republicans believe that everyone is able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and that Democrats believe people occasionally need help to pull themselves up." But she had limits. She along with my father supported Kennedy over Humphrey in 1960, because she said about Hubert, "H would not only give someone the shirt off his back but give the shirt off your back too." And the way she said it, I gathered that you wouldn't be asked "Pretty please". I also have to admit that "socialism" is not the dirty word for me as it is for many others. My hometown Milwaukee had Socialist mayors from 1906 to 1956 when then Mayor Frank Zeidler became a Democrat. That half century is still a high water mark for good clean efficient government. And without people like the Fabian Socialists (George Bernard Shaw was one), we wouldn't have things like public roads, water works or sewage. And the doyens of capitalism have always gone after public funds from the subsidies for railroads from their beginnings to the building of public airports for the use of privately owned airlines to tax abatements for private development projects. Take any government anywhere on the planet of which there are records, and the distribution of wealth in the society under that government will be in large measure determined by that government's economic, fiscal and tax policies, to include both commission and omission. Gerry |