Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom: Welfare State Is Draw for Illegals
The author’s point is well taken. The failure to logically consider cause and effect in this country is a key reason that our problems keep getting compounded by piling legislation on top of legislation while treating only the symptoms.
I’d like to further address Fantom’s point about education, Social Security, and Medicare, with an analogy. He writes early on:
“I am somewhat amused by the Authors use of paying for others children to attend school when he has none himself and calling it welfare. I find it ironic that it is someone else’s kids who will be paying his SS and Mediscam. No doubt Gus will turn down those bennie’s as he will not want to be a hypocrite be accepting welfare after penning this screed.” (April 30, 2010 – 5:13 am)
Suppose I am assaulted on the street by a thug, and subsequently turned over my wallet at gunpoint. Should I then be barred from testifying against the thug in court? Wouldn’t someone like Fantom consider my testimony then to be hypocritical? If not, why not? After all, did I not participate in the crime? But the thug had a gun, right? Well, so does the government and, in effect, does anyone who supports those programs. If I scheme to evade those taxes, I get arrested, fined, and jailed. That government programs are camouflaged behind the legal curtain of law does not change their essential nature.
My wife and I have paid in $414,396 in combined SS @ Medicare taxes, including the employer’s “share” (which is actually paid by the employee), as of December 2008. This is according to our official government statements. Add in a reasonable rate of return over the past four-plus decades and you’re probably looking at a potential nest egg of close to a million bucks. That’s what the government is holding of our money. Yet, Fantom argues that we must either forgo any “bennie” return on our own money or shut our traps!
Participating in a government program I am forced to pay for while simultaneously arguing for repeal is neither wrong nor hypocritical. Declaring that by collecting promised benefits from a program I disagree with morally negates my free speech rights is no different from denying my right to testify against a street thug who robs me at gunpoint.
Fantom has exposed a little-appreciated, hidden danger of welfare state dependency – the covert power to silence the opposition and render the First Amendment irrelevant.
