Hope and Change, Pt. 2

Continued from here.

This won't be a blinding flash of insight to a Freedomista, but the rest of humanity doesn't seem to get it: Governments Don't Create Anything.

They don't create wealth. They don't create jobs. They don't create safety, or security, or freedom, or liberty or truth or justice and if what this government has been creating lately is the American way you can keep my share.

Governments don't create anything. All they can do is take. Everything they hand out with one hand they took from someone with the other because governments can't create wealth. It's no wonder so many politicians really seem to believe wealth is a zero-sum equation because for them it is. The only thing politicians have to give away is what they've taken by force or threat of force. Our new philosopher-king has been making an endless array of absolutely incredible promises of all the things he's going to give us. Never mind if a word of it is true, assume for a moment that it all is: Where's it all coming from? The man's never held a productive job in his life: Does anybody think all this largess is coming from his pocket? Oh, hell no. 'The rich will pay their fair share.' We could parse this chilling sentence all day long, but many do and I'm trying to keep it short and I'm more interested in a question that doesn't get beaten to death: Pay whom? For what?

If we were truly talking about wealth redistribution here, then Warren Buffett et al would be forced at gunpoint to write checks to poor families all across the nation. That would also be theft, which is immoral, but what's really happening is even worse. That would actually do a little short-term good, and the victims would be limited in number and well defined. But wealth redistribution is not what's happening; that's just the mask for what's happening.

When the government takes money out of your pocket and out of the economy in general, through all its multifarious means, where does that money go? Some, of course, goes to state and federal programs that keep the flock quiet and give the impression that the various forms of government are really essential. That's absolutely necessary, of course, because governments have been brought down before this with torches and pitchforks and our masters know it. I doubt there's a person in Washington DC or any state capitol who holds Louis XVI or Benito Mussolini or Nicolae Ceauşescu as role models, simply because of the way they ended up. If history teaches anything, it's that a ruler can't let the Misery Index climb too high, or all the armed guards in the world won't protect him. At some point in that index it becomes clear to the meanest intelligence who's really been spreading the misery. So yeah, some of it goes to goodies for the masses. Considering all the promises, and all the people the promises have been made to, I'm sure it's not a small sum.

But it's nowhere near the total. Where does the rest of it go? What's it all for?

To Be Continued...