Not Your Father’s Welfare Statists

February 18, 2017

My old graduate school professor and one-time George Mason University colleague Gordon Tullock used to argue with the Ted Kennedy/Hubert Humphrey school of welfare statists during his day by asking them:  Why are you so stingy?  Why don’t you advocate giving welfare payments to anyone anywhere in the world?  Why are you only concerned about American poor people?

Gordon’s point was that anyone in his right mind would have to realize that such a policy would quickly bankrupt the U.S. government (hold your applause, please), and impoverish America.

But today’s welfare statists are very different.  Their response to Gordon Tullock’s argument today would be:  Right on, brother Gordon!  Today’s welfare statists are not Ted Kennedy “liberals” but hardcore, Marxist totalitarians who seek totalitarian control of all aspects of society, even down to dictating that men should be allowed to use women’s bathrooms if they “self identify” as gender-confused.  One of their tools is the “Cloward-Piven strategy,” named after two 1960s-era communistic sociologists (sorry for the redundancy).  Their “strategy” is to enroll so many people on welfare that the system will become bankrupted.  Oblivious and uncaring for all the pathologies caused by welfare statism, such as destruction of the work ethic, family breakup, illegitimate births run rampant, etc., they posited that when the glorious day finally arrived when the welfare state bankrupted America, they would then be in a position to create an even bigger welfare state with a “guaranteed income” for every non-working parasite, paid for by what’s left of the productive class.

This is why they are so worshipful of immigration and open borders.  They don’t care about immigrants from Syria and Yemen any more than they care about native-born Americans.  They dream of armies of invading welfare parasites that can do for them in a few short years what they have been trying to achieve for the past fifty years: bankrupt the country, so that they can take advantage of the social turmoil they have created and put in place some version of their socialist utopia.  The mobs of teenagers that you see on TV pretending to “protest” the enforcement of the immigration laws that have been passed by Congress are the Left’s “useful idiots,” many of whom are paid to “protest” by commie-billionaire George Soros and other string pullers of the Democratic Party.  (And idiots they are:  last week such a rent-a-mob “protest” occurred in Baltimore after the police arrested several illegal immigrants who had committed multiple felonies.  These young morons have apparently been taught that foreign felons should be left alone, and only the domestic ones should be prosecuted for their crimes).

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Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo [send him mail] is a former professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a longtime member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. He is the author or co-author of eighteen books including The Real LincolnHow Capitalism Saved AmericaLincoln UnmaskedHamilton's CurseOrganized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About GovernmentThe Problem with Socialism; and The Politically-Incorrect Guide to Economics