Taking with one hand and giving with the other hand to favored political groups, basically sums up contemporary welfare states. They are election exercises disguised as government.
Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I have found that if people believe they are on the receiving end of a kickback, they will joyfully go along with it, even as they got proverbially punched in the mouth to lose the money in the first place.
Just watch how people react to partial repayment of their interest-free loan to the Feds every spring. The, ahem, “tax refund”.
It’s not one of Sowell’s more perspicacious comments. What you’re referring to would be fair in regard to discretionary grants, tax preferences, or subsidies to preferred sectors. The vast bulk of welfare spending is directed at large demographic constituencies. It’s not particularly flamboyant, unlike the pork barrel projects members of Congress enlist local media in hyping. Nor are you ‘giving it back’. These expenditures are socialized because there are large segments of the public who could not afford them without an architecture of redistribution. You can argue they should not be subsidized, but you have to be careful with that lest you end up going full Ayn Rand (which is something both Sowell and Milton Friedman generally avoided doing).
You make a good point, Art, but you seem to be primarily addressing the nanny state rather than the welfare state. There’s a lot of overlap there, but the two aren’t identical.
You make a good point, Art, but you seem to be primarily addressing the nanny state rather than the welfare state. There’s a lot of overlap there, but the two aren’t identical.
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I wasn’t addressing the nanny state. The nanny state IMO would refer to (1) the hypertrophy of health and safety regulations and tort liability or (2) the use of treasury money to support public agencies and finance philanthropic agencies whose mission was to ‘help’ people and (3) the use of certification programs to manufacture pseudo-professions and distort and disfigure the training of actual professions to render them peddlers of nanny state ideology. There’s quite a vein of discussion there, but it’s tangential to my point.
“What you’re referring to would be fair in regard to discretionary grants, tax preferences, or subsidies to preferred sectors”
This sure sounds like nanny state to me … These things don’t go to welfare recipients. But I’ll take your word for it.
In either case, I’m siding with Sowell on this one. He’s way smarter than most people. 🙂