Upon further reflection it occurred to me that I also enjoyed many the same of the great benefits of our society as he did. Same roads. Same public schools and colleges. Same law enforcement. Same national defense. Same national parks. And yet I, like everyone else in my income bracket, had never paid a dime in income taxes. What a great country this is.
And yet, for some it is never enough. The politics of redistribution has a highly addictive quality to both the recipients and the political middle-men. The recipient of direct subsidies and material giveaways comes to expect an ever increasing level of benefits and security. The political middle-man gains a sense of self-gratification and self-importance as the ever-widening circle of recipients becomes more deeply dependent and loyal to their perceived benefactors. But it cannot go on forever. Eventually the demands outstrip the resources and promises must be broken.
But it was immoral to make the promises in the first place. The promises cannot be kept and they create false expectations in others.
And even without any direct subsidies and giveaways, it is important to remember that every U.S. resident receives a steady stream of benefits every day by just residing in this country.
Elizabeth Warren and liberalism, twisting the ‘social contract’ - George F. Will
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”...
Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.
Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.
The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.
