Replacing the Welfare-Warfare State with a Free Society
by
<http://fff.org/author/jacob-hornberger-2/>Jacob G. Hornberger June 20, 2013
The following is a non-verbatim rendition of a
talk entitled “Replacing the Welfare-Warfare
State with a Free Society” that FFF president
Jacob Hornberger delivered to the Fairfax County,
Virginia, Young Republicans on June 19, 2013:
Thank you. It’s very nice to be here to share
ideas on liberty with the Fairfax County Young Republicans.
Everywhere you look, there is a crisis.
Social Security. There isn’t a fund, there never
has been a fund, and there never will be a fund.
The system is busted, bankrupt.
Medicare and Medicaid. Healthcare costs continue
to soar. Doctors are retiring early in disgust
over the medical system. This program is busted too.
The war on immigrants. A perpetual series of
crises. In fact, I thought they told us that that
long, expensive Berlin Fence that they were
constructing on the U.S.-Mexico border was going
to finally bring an end to never-ending
immigration crises. Yet, here we are, in the midst of another big crisis.
The war on drugs. Decades of warfare and all we
have are the same mantras and the same death,
destruction, and ruination of lives. You’re too
young to realize that the mantras you’re hearing
today are the same ones that they were using when
I was your age. When I went back to my hometown
of Laredo, Texas, to practice law, the very first
case I handled was a criminal case in federal
court involving drugs. The DEA agents and the
prosecutors were saying the same things that
theirs successors are saying today. It’s just one
great big federal machine that continues grinding
on despite its manifest failure, death, and
destruction. How many dead people are there in
Mexico now? 60,000 in the last 6 years alone.
That’s due to the drug war, not drugs.
There’s also the terrorist crisis. And the crises
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Torture,
assassination, and now the NSA crisis, arising
out of the government’s attempt to keep us safe
–safe from the very threats that the government
itself produces with its foreign policy.
And let’s not forget the dollar crisis, one in
which the Federal Reserve has debased the value
of our currency over a period of several decades.
Out of control federal spending. That’s a crisis most everyone is aware of.
And there’s the debt-ceiling crisis which pops up
every few years. The ceiling tells us that too
much government debt is a bad thing. Yet, they
keep raising the limit and adding to the debt.
Their attitude is: Why worry? Just pass it on the
young generation. That’s you they’re talking about.
We’re told that all these crises are a normal and
essential part of living in America, of living in a free society.
But they’re not normal. They are aberrant and
bizarre. And they have absolutely nothing to do with a free society.
The question naturally arises: Why do we have all these ongoing crises?
The answer is simple: We live under a
governmental system that is rotten to the core.
Notice that I didn’t say that the people working
within the system are rotten. I said that the system itself is rotten.
Consider the role of the federal government in
our domestic lives. Its primary role is to take
money away from those to whom it belongs and give
it to people to whom it does not belong. That’s
what such welfare-state programs as Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farms subsidies,
education grants, food stamps, public housing,
and aid to foreign dictators are all abouttaking
money from those to whom it belongs to give it to
those to whom it does not belong.
If I were to do that on a private basis, everyone
would recognize the fundamental immorality of my
conduct. Suppose I rob everyone in this room and
use all of the money to help the poor to get
healthcare and an education. Would I be
considered a good, compassionate person? On the
contrary, I’d be considered a thief. If I pointed
out how I had used the money to help the poor,
your response would be: “Tell it to the judge at
sentencing. You had no right, morally or legally,
to take our money and be good with it. You should
have used your own money. Or you could have asked
us for a donation, a request that we would have the right to decline.”
Yet, as soon as the federal government enters the
pictures, people’s attitudes change. That’s
because they have come to view the federal
government as an idol, one that can magically
convert an immoral act into a moral act. The
entire welfare state is based on forcibly taking
money from those to whom it belongs and giving it
to people whom the government feels deserve it more.
And it’s all considered to be moral,
compassionate, and caring. In fact, Republicans
call themselves “compassionate conservatives” for
their support of the welfare state. Like
liberals, they think that the welfare state
reflects what a good, caring, and compassionate society in which we live.
Who are the saints in a welfare state? The IRS
agents that terrorize people into paying their
taxes? The bureaucrats who distribute the money?
The members of Congress who enact the programs?
The president, who signs the welfare-state bills
into law? The taxpayers? The voters? The citizens?
The answer is: None of the above. Caring and
compassion is antithetical to force, and it’s
force that drives the welfare-state and the taxes
that fund it. When people are forced to care for
others, care and compassion disappear from the
scene. The only genuine meaning of care and
compassion is when it comes from the voluntary,
willing heart of the individual, not when it
comes through the force of government.
That’s why Americans are besieged with perpetual
crises. They have embraced a system that is
antithetical to basic principles of morality and
fundamental religious principles. Moreover, they
have abandoned the founding principles of
America, a country that once rejected such
socialist and interventionist programs as Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies,
education grants, aid to dictatorships,
immigration controls, drug laws, and economic regulations.
In fact, the term “free enterprise” meant
something entirely different to our American
ancestors than it does to modern-day Americans.
Today’s Americans think that “free enterprise”
means enterprise that is regulated by the
government. Our ancestors understood that the
term meant “enterprise that is free of government
regulation, control, or taxation.”
When you’ve embraced a rotten governmental
system, you’re going to reap what you sow. God
has created a consistent universe, one in which a
bad tree is going to bear bad fruit.
And it doesn’t matter one iota how convinced
Americans are that all this is “freedom and free
enterprise.” In fact, one of my favorite parts of
going to watch the Washington Nationals is what
happens in the third inning or so. Most everyone
stands and, with a tear in his eye, reverently
sings, “Thank God I’m an American because at
least I know I’m free” as they praise the troops
for “protecting our freedom” by killing people
thousands of miles away from American shores.
It’s what might be called the “life of the lie”
or “the life of delusion.” The plight of the
American people is best summed up in the words of
the German thinker Johann Goethe, who said, “None
are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
How can people honestly be considered free when
the government has the power to take whatever
amount of their income it wants and give it to
others? With the income tax, people’s income has
effectively been nationalized. The government
decides how much people are going to be permitted
to keep. It’s no different from an allowance that a parent gives a child.
Or consider drug laws, perhaps the clearest
manifestation of the serf-like existence of the
American people. We can all understand why a
murderer, robber, or rapist should be punished by
the state. But imagine a person quietly sitting
in the privacy of his own home drinking booze,
smoking cigarettes, smoking dope, snorting
cocaine, and injecting heroin. The government
wields the authority to bust his door down and
punish him for engaging in purely
self-destructive behavior. The notion is that he
belongs to society. He belongs to the collective.
He exists to serve the greater good. He must be
fixed so that he can be made to be a healthy and productive member of society.
It would be difficult to find a clearer violation
of the principles of freedom than that. Freedom
doesn’t entail the right to do the correct or
responsible thing. It entails the right to do the
incorrect or irresponsible thing, so long as it
doesn’t involve the initiation of force against
someone else. When a person can be jailed and
punished by the state for engaging in
self-destructive behavior, there is no rational
way that that can be considered a free society.
And believing that one is free, when it just
isn’t so, doesn’t change reality. It just
engenders psychosis. In fact, my hunch is that
one of the big reasons why there is such a big
drug problem in America is precisely because
people honestly believe that they live in a free
society. It is so despairing to them that a
“free” society entails a bizarre life of
perpetual crises that they turn to drugs to escape it.
The warfare state, of course, is no different. We
live under a governmental system in which the
president, the military, the CIA, and the NSA now
wield powers that the greatest dictators in
history have wielded. The powers to assassinate
people, to indefinitely detain people without due
process or trial by jury, to kidnap and rendition
people, to torture people, to subject people to
LSD experiments, to invade and occupy foreign
countries, to support coups in foreign lands, to
install, train, maintain, and support brutal
dictatorial regimes, to spy on and monitor the
activities of people everywhere. In other words,
the dark type of things that Americans used to
complain that communist or totalitarian regimes
were engaged in. It’s all become a normal part of American life.
Oh, and it’s all considered “freedom” too. “Thank
God I’m an American because at least I know I’m
free.” Praise the troops for defending our “freedom.”
Never mind that it’s the national- security state
itself engenders the threats that they then use
as the excuse to “temporarily” deprive us our
rights and freedom. They go abroad with their
sanctions, embargoes, invasions, occupations,
assassinations, regime-change operations,
kidnappings, and support of brutal dictatorial
pro-U.S. regimes. Then, when victims retaliate
with terrorist strikes, U.S. officials cry,
“We’ve been attacked because foreigners love our
foreign policy but hate us for our freedom and
values.” We now have to have “temporary” emergency powers to “keep you safe.”
It’s one of the oldest rackets in history.
Produce the threat and then convince people to
surrender their rights and freedoms,
“temporarily” of course, all the while convincing
them of how tyranny constitutes freedom when it
comes at the hands of their own government that
loves them, takes care of them with welfare, and
keeps them “safe” from the dangers it produces,
all the while convincing people that the Founding
Fathers and the Framers were wrong to suggest
that the federal government constitutes the
biggest threat to the freedom and well-being of the American people.
So, what can be done about all this?
One option is to accept and embrace the
welfare-state way of life. Just acknowledge that
this is the system that you have been born and
raised in and that it is here to stay, as a
permanent part of American life. Dream about when
you get to be 65 when you can say to yourself,
“Finally I get the chance to plunder and loot
people in their 20s, just like people in their
60s were doing to me when Jacob Hornberger gave
that talk to the Fairfax County Young Republicans some 35 years ago.”
You can spend your life, your energy, and your
money trying to fix or reform the system. But I
think that after 20 or 30 years going down that
road, you are going to discover that you have
wasted a large part of your life and your money.
A rotten system cannot be fixed or reformed. In
fact, any reforms inevitably produce new and
bigger crises, which then necessitate bigger,
more expensive and more intrusive reforms, as we
have seen with Social Security, healthcare,
immigration, drug laws, and the rest of the welfare-regulatory state.
But if you decide to go down the reform route, at
least don’t call it “freedom” or “free market
approaches,” as we often hear proponents of
things like school vouchers, Medical IRAs, or
Social Security reform plans refer to their proposals.
Think about it like this: Imagine that you were
living in 1850 Virginia. I come to you and say,
“Slavery is a rotten system.” You agree and
devote your life to getting a 5-day work week for
the slaves, 50-hour work days, and families get
to stay together. I say to you: You’re doing fine
work improving the life of the slaves. But please
don’t say to me or teach your children that the
slaves are now free and living in a free society
or that your reforms constitute a “free-market
approach” to slavery. What you have done is
improve the plight of the slaves, but that is not freedom.
The same applies to efforts to reform the
welfare-warfare state. It might, or might not,
improve the lives of the American people. But it is not freedom.
Genuine freedom entails a dismantling repeal
of the welfare state and the warfare state,
including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
and the entire national-security state apparatus
that was grafted onto our constitutional order
without even the semblance of a constitutional
amendment. Socialist programs as well as an
enormous standing army, a vast military
industrial complex, the CIA, and the NSA are
antithetical to a genuinely free society.
So, you have another choice to lead America and
the world out of the statist muck in which our
country and the world is stuck. I’m challenging
you to rise to the occasion to join the ranks
of people who brought us Magna Carta, the
Petition of Right, the Declaration of
Independence, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights,
religious liberty, and economic liberty.
People tell you that you are the key to future. I
say: You are a key to the present.
No generation can bind you into accepting their
particular economic or political system. The
older generations have chosen socialism,
interventionism, militarism, and imperialism.
That doesn’t have to be your choice. You can
choose individual liberty, free markets, and a
constitutionally limited republic. You can change
the system and bring an end to the never-ending
crises. You can restore freedom, harmony,
prosperity, and normality to the lives of the
American people, including your own.
The country and the world are crying out for leadership. The choice is yours.
http://fff.org/2013/06/20/replacing-the-welfare-warfare-state-with-a-free-society/
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