Thursday, April 7, 2011

The federal budget has become a contemporary morality play.

The following link leads to an article written by Roger Pilon who is vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies.  This article was published in the April 7, 2010 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

This article was written as a response to several advertisements from religious organizations that depict federal spending in a moral light.  Some highlights Roger’s article are as follows:
"We the People" constituted ourselves for the several reasons set forth in our Constitution's Preamble, but chief among those — the reason we fought for our independence — was to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Yet nowhere today is that liberty more in jeopardy than in a federal budget that reduces us all, in so many ways, to government dependents.
The ads' signers imagine that the Good Samaritan parable instructs us to attend to the afflicted through the coercive government programs of the modern welfare state. It does not. The Good Samaritan is virtuous not because he helps the fallen through the force of law but because he does so voluntarily, which he can do only if he has the right to freely choose the good, or not.
Americans are a generous people. They will help the less fortunate if left free to do so. What they resent is being forced to do good — and in ways that are not only inefficient but impose massive debts upon their children. That's not the way free people help the young and less fortunate.
And it's not as if we were bereft of a plan for determining our priorities as a nation. Our Constitution does that quite nicely. It authorizes a focused but limited public sector, enabling a vast private sector of liberty. But early 20th-century Progressives — politicians and intellectuals alike — deliberately shifted that balance. Today the federal government exercises vast powers never granted to it, restricting liberties never surrendered. It's all reflected in the federal budget, the redistributive elements of which speak to nothing so much as theft — and that's immoral.
This article illustrates the basic political struggle of our modern society. Over time a moral standard has been assigned to government spending. This has lead to the current great divide between our citizens. Advocates for big government view spending as a necessary moral action that can right all of the wrongs perceived in society. Therefore in their minds anyone who opposes government spending is evil.


There is nothing virtuous about being forced to provide charity. For charity to be truly virtuous it must be voluntary and personal. The great hypocrisy in the belief of government spending as a moral obligation is the fact that it is immoral to take another person’s property.