Your Tax Dollars Fund Retired Nazis

The United States spent $296 billion to defeat the Axis powers in World War II. That figure does not include “veterans benefits, interest on war-related debt, or assistance to allies.” The conflict resulted in 405,399 Americans killed and 670,846 wounded, making it the most costly war in the nation’s history by far.

In light of that, you may be surprised to learn that American taxpayers have since shelled out potentially millions more to “suspected Nazi criminals” living in the United States. Fox News breaks down the report from the Associated Press:

The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records…

Among those who benefited:

–armed SS troops who guarded the Nazi network of camps where millions of Jews perished.

–an SS guard who took part in the brutal liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland that killed as many as 13,000 Jews.

–a Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland.

–a German rocket scientist accused of using slave labor to build the V-2 rocket that pummeled London. He later won NASA’s highest honor for helping to put a man on the moon.

The AP’s findings are the result of more than two years of interviews, research and analysis of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources.

You owe it to yourself to check out the rest of the article. Among the highlights, the Justice Department responded to a request from the AP to disclose the number of Nazis receiving payments, and the amount of those payments, by claiming no such records were kept.

A further barrier, [Spokesman William “BJ”] Jarrett said, is that there is no exception in U.S. privacy law that “allows us to disclose information because the individual is a Nazi war criminal or an accused Nazi war criminal.”

That’s right. Nazis have privacy rights. This from the same federal government which takes every opportunity to spy on its own citizens without cause or warrant.

This is what happens when “need” is democratized. We can get bend out of shape over suspected Nazi war criminals living off our tax dollars. But the root problem is Social Security itself, along with any redistributive tax scheme which removes individual consent from economic transactions.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how upset you are about funding the retirement of Holocaust participants. You’ll still be funding them tomorrow, because you don’t get to choose whether you pay your Social Security taxes.

(Today’s Fightin Words podcast is on this topic available here. 7:59 minutes long; 7.72 MB file size. Right click here to download this show to your hard drive. Subscribe through iTunes or RSS feed.)