The fraud of the social welfare state is that it is not about compassion but about power over people and their lives. William Voegeli said:
America is rich enough to have spent more inflation-adjusted dollars on national defense in 2009 than we did in 1968 with 500,000 troops in Vietnam, even though we are devoting half as much of our GDP to national defense now as we were then. Had our defense policy been driven by the relentless quest to address and if necessary discover “unmet military needs,” we would still be spending roughly the same percentage of GDP on national defense that we did at the height of the wars in Vietnam (9.4 percent) and Korea (14.2 percent). We would, in other words, be spending hundreds of billions of dollars pointlessly.
Military spending has been constrained because it corresponds to objective conditions in the world beyond our shores. The objective conditions, domestically, are that long-term economic growth enhances the ability of more people to spend more of their lives providing for more of their own health care, education, and welfare through their own resources and precautions. Such prosperity should allow a welfare state to shrink relative to the size of the economy, even while growing in absolute terms, if needed, to assist the truly needy. By applying the same logic to welfare spending that we do to military spending, in other words, we can avoid the taxes and the borrowing that would change America irrevocably, and for the worse.
As a country grows richer, there should be less need for welfare, unless of course some other motive other than helping those in need is in play. Read Voegeli’s full article here.
