Fred Schnaubelt

Welfare State Chickens Coming Home to Roost      San Diego Transcript Aug. 29, 2011

                                               “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child;
                                                 when I became a man, I did away with childish things.”

If you love your children, you don’t keep them children forever. Even mother birds know at some point their fledglings must be pushed out of the nest to fly on their own. Politicians tell us don’t fly — give up your self-worth, your independence, your individualism. Come be dependent on us, and we’ll give you the “right” to a job, affordable housing and free health care, if you vote for us. (Giving rights, of course, is much cheaper than actually providing shelter, jobs or health care.)

Children want, grab, demand, stamp their feet, yell and scream. Child psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers once opined that children are born savages, and it’s up to mothers to civilize them.  Remember when we were children. Without thinking, miraculously we had food, clothing, a warm bed and roof overhead, a doctor when needed. Where did it all come from? Don’t know, never thought about it. It just was.

Politicians never doing away with childish things think wealth simply exists. Don’t know wherefore it comes, why or how. Wealth just is! Not treating wealth as something to be earned, they mindlessly parrot that “to be fair,” it must be redistributed — implicitly acknowledging it belongs to someone else.

All wealth, in essence, is voluntarily redistributed the moment it’s earned (bought, sold or invested). Wealth is not so much owned as “managed” by those having proven a success in a few things. If redistributed by those earning it isn’t fair. How can it be fair to be redistributed by those who simply work for the government?
 
The chickens are coming home to roost in Greece, France and now England with their cultures of dependency leading to mob violence. We are seeing their children “demanding” the spice of life be delivered by government. They stamp their feet, set fire to Greek banks, burn an average of 3,500 French cars a week and torch the English shops that provide their sustenance.

This should surprise no one. Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek forewarned in “The Road to Serfdom,” that democratic socialism being embraced by England with “extensive government control produces a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people” (pg. xiv).

The intelligentsia in socialist countries and now the U.S., intellectuals, professors and the media, teach young people with a steady drumbeat that they’re entitled to a high standard of living regardless of effort, telling them they can’t succeed without government help. Theodore Dalrymple, writing about London’s hoodlums in the August City Journal, notes that if they don’t “receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, it’s a sign of injustice.”

It’s astonishing to read the advice British intellectuals pass on to government authorities with sympathies for offenders and antipathy toward self-defense: “Incarcerating young miscreants is not a message we want to send.” The use of water cannons against the mobs is described by the Guardian newspaper as “backward and barbaric.” England is reaping what it sows: The greater the welfare state, the greater the problems, the greater the sense of entitlement and the greater the justification for violence. “The banks got theirs, now it’s our turn,” “We’re showing police and the rich that we can do what we want," “Smash the banks!”

British children have been trained and coddled into believing they have a “right” not to work — a right to be supported by those who do work. And if not sufficiently supported, they will do whatever they want, including biting the hand that feeds them, disregarding that strikes against the government are strikes against all. Dependency engenders not thanks but resentment.

Everyone thinks they’re underpaid and underappreciated. In a welfare state, the government determines who gets what (comparable worth, minimum wage, living wage), thereby increasing unemployment and discontent among those whose self-worth in their own eyes is much greater than what the government may determine.

Greek workers not only think they are worth 70,000 euros for a similar job in Germany that pays 55,000 euros, but also expect to retire earlier with higher pensions. Forty percent work for the government and expect foreign banks to lend the Greek government money to pay them. If they don’t they’ll riot, force a default on government debt and thereby destroy the foreign banks. Like children, they never think about from where the money comes, i.e., the savings of foreigners, which include some depositors’ own retirement savings. Wealth just is.

Under free enterprise, workers are also consumers who through buying or abstaining from buying goods and services determine the success of all businesses. How successful a business satisfies consumers will determine the wages and salaries of everyone working in any particular business. In effect, workers impartially determine the pay for all other workers knowing perfectly well what others are worth based on their own work experience.

The U.S. government, following in Europe’s footsteps, is “altering the character of the American people” by breeding a sense of entitlement for an increasing portion of our population of which “fully half the “taxpayers pay no tax at all.” When politicians favor one group over another, like in Europe, it gives rise to the flash mobs beginning to pop up in American cities.

On American TV, one politician after another exclaims the rich don’t pay “their fair share,” despite that the “top 3 percent of income tax filers ($200,000 and above) pay more than the bottom 97 percent,” as editorialized in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 17. And this is unfair?

Furthermore when intellectuals don’t receive the income and prestige equal to their self-evaluations many speak, think and reason like children, treating other adults as children. The result: a breakdown in civil discourse, e.g., the Democratic Party yelling at the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party “To go straight to hell” and “The real enemy is the tea party." Why? By delivering Congress a “Satan Sandwich” opposing further deficit spending.

The TEA Party is the “enemy” because adherents have discovered the secret of tax increases. They are born mostly by those who work, produce or invest, and are expected to shut up and have their income redistributed to an increasing number of people unwilling to “do away with childish things.”

Politicians, of course, distribute not their own wealth, but other people’s wealth often in great displays of synthetic compassion, while enriching their own sinecures. By what moral right? There was a time when this was known as theft, but now it’s all gussied up as redistribution. If we're not careful, Greece, France and England will be happening here. Governments are formed to protect people and property, to create a fair field without favor, not to redistribute other people’s wealth, and certainly not to alter the character of the American people.

                                                 Schnaubelt, president of Citizens for Private Property Rights, has been a commercial real estate broker
                                                 for 39 years and was a San Diego City Councilman from 1977-81.

                                                       Fred can be reached at 619.280-2082 or fredschnaubelt@mindspring.com
 

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