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Mar

28

Elderly Vote to Stick Others With Tab for Free Lunches

March 28, 2006 |

One expects politicians to do their usual sucking up to the voter at all costs in order to win elections. That is the uncouth nature of pure democracy, where the proverbial four wolves (the majority of voters) and a sheep (the minority of voters) get to vote on what (or who) is for dinner. In a representative democracy, it may well be that 400,000 wolves electing 4 wolves, and 1,000 sheep electing one sheep, and then those four wolves and one sheep vote, but the results are still what we would expect.

ben_franklin.jpgOf course, that predetermined result is why our founding fathers sternly avoided creating a direct democracy, and instead provided us with a constitutional republic. A republic, that is (as Ben Franklin warned as he left Constitutional Hall the day our system of government was finalized) so long as the citizens were willing to defend it.

Clearly we were incapable of doing so (as Franklin probably figured), and today we have a system that is probably best described as detente between “collectivist democracy” and parastitic capitalism.  With the former, the voters have progressively taken on the increasing role of spoiled child, operating with the presumption that they are entitled and morally justified to get whatever they want so long as the act is laundered via a voting majority. With the latter, corporations buy their way into the system with high paid lobbyists doing their bidding with politicians who control $ billions to the highest bidder. Never mind such pesky details as the constraints of economic reality / gravity, or for that matter, the sticky issues of freedom and liberty.

With all that as a backdrop, here in Pennsylvania, the move is on among a majority of voters — many of lower income and of advanced age — to eliminate their own taxes on property and shift them onto younger working generations via a large increase in the state income tax. (Of course, there is no talk or movement to reduce the PA budget or its rapid pace of growth.)

Now what we really have going on here is exactly why it was decided by our founding fathers that big government was a stupid idea — it grows and grows, slowly strangling to death the liberty and the wealth of its citizens, while serving almost exclusively as a means of wealth redistribution, working only so long as those in charge can prevent themselves - much like parasites — from killing their hosts. Those old fuddy-duddy founders also knew that big government was the natural progression of pure democracy.

In our particular case, for the better part of 75 years, PA politicians (well, all politicians, for that matter) have been offering free lunch after free lunch to voters who should have known better. Starting in the teens and 1920s, voters started to fall victim to the syrupy New Deal snake oil from politicians spouting new era slogans about how the old rules no longer mattered. In the process, the warnings and brilliance of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, etc., where discarded as if they were outdated as horse carriages and stables were becoming during the same time.

But, What! Ho! Today a massive tax bill keeps coming due for the compounded costs of those decades massive spending and related debt. We can thank for this all those politicians’ promises that were rarely delivered, and if they were, only at a fraction of what was proposed, and at a price enormously higher than initially assured. In fact, with each expensive and poor delivery of a promise, the voters were suckered time and again with a new set of election pledges that, if we just taxed a little higher here and spent a little more there, we’d — this time — solve problems X and Y once and for all, and it’d all work out for everyone.

Yet, today, those very same voters are long retired or nearing retirement, and facing the lie of policies like a bankrupt social security system and an impossibly under-funded Medicare and Medicaid system. These voters’ incomes have stagnated, while -thanks again to the government policies they enabled - prices have inflated to the point where $100 in 1914 only buys about $3.26 in goods today. (Or, more to their own lifetimes, $100 in 1950 buys only about $13.60 of goods today.) These same policies are directly related to why their real estate has inflated so dramatically the past few years, placing all citizens arbitrarily into higher tax situations. Yet they still believe in promises emanating from the Fantasy Lands on both the Potomac and the Susquehanna. (Evidence? They demand a prescription drug program, piling on the previous mistakes with even more errors — as if somehow the results will be different. You reap the seeds you sow.)

With that, let’s return back to the politicians - and specifically the ones in Harrisburg looking to appease the ever-graying population of Pennsylvania, and more relevent to our local readers, the infamously “second-oldest population county to Dade County, Florida”, - the voters of Allegheny County.

aarp.jpgThese are the citizens who demanded, accepted, and gorged themselves for 50 years on the free lunches of taxes, patronage and hyper pro-labor rules of our region that have had the direct consequence of scaring away many existing and potential businesses, as well as thousands of families and younger people, all of whom have chosen more friendly pastures elsewhere in the country. (Of course, this is also a massive and still growing National problem for which Pittsburgh is but a leading indicator.) Indeed, the voters should have been more careful with what they wished for because, had they listened to those who wanted to preserve liberty, small government, and low taxes, they would have known that this was exactly what they would get. After all, it has happened through history time and again with identically disastrous results. (Again, we are back to why the founding fathers did it the way they did.)

Instead, these voters trusted the native American criminal class of politicians, whose only governing concern is getting reelected — and doing so by blowing along with — and ideally ahead of — the winds of public impulse, and then playing the role of well-paid middleman in the related transactions - all of which can always be broken down to the crass concept of confiscating the rights and property of some groups of people, and bestowing them as a reward to his own constituency.

However, just as she was warned by the boring old fashioned types for the last 100 years, what Lola has ended up with is a very different animal from what Lola wanted. Consequently, half-desperate and, still, half-pigheaded, the voters push yet more on the string, hoping the same, old, failed actions will somehow produce a different result this time - believing in philosophically bankrupt politicians who are offering fresh batches of snake-oil remedies to the very problems they and their predecessors have created with previous batches of the stuff.

Indeed, this voter-politician partnership has succeeded in poisoning the Goose that laid the golden egg, and the duo is at this moment in Harrisburg unwittingly conspiring to wring from its neck its last bit of life by sticking the tab for their own irresponsibility and lack of self control onto the backs of income earners who have not yet retired. (Of course, as alluded to before, this is precisely what has been going on the Federal level as well.) If they succeed, the tax base will shrink further (through both economic slowing and fleeing taxpayers), while politicians will continue to thrive in the mega-growth industry of solving the very problems they create.

It is a cycle that goes around and around, a consumptive machine that will not stop until it collapses under the weight of its own impossible promises, dragging everyone down with it to rebuild with whatever is left after the dust has settled.

That is the dirty punch-line of our collectivist democracy: The voters should always get what they want - and good and hard

_______

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” Benjamin Franklin, 1759


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