Entitlement Programs

It is a truth of human nature that when many people face a hardship, they will turn to the most powerful and affluent entity they can find and beg and plead for assistance, tell their sad story and play a guilt trip to end all guilt trips.  Every child does it from birth, it is a hardwired and instinctive response in people, and not everyone has learned to suppress it and work first to try to solve their problem fully within their own means.  Most problems and burdens can be overcome by the means available to those bearing them, and in the rare case where the problem is too large to be solved in that manner, people as a whole are generous and charitable.  But there is a limit to generosity and charity, and in the same manner as the townsfolk ignoring the boy who cried wold because it was an all-too-frequent occurrence, people begin to lose their interest in being bighearted and generous when they are being forced to give to everything, even things they despise, every day.

It is also just as true that you do not strengthen and improve a person, you don’t truly help him, by carrying his burdens for him or removing them entirely.  You can help him grow by being an assistant when he needs more hands than he has, but to be compassionate and charitable you need to not step in and run things, but allow him to do what he needs to do without getting in his way.  As a parent,  you allow the child to crash his bicycle until he learns how to ride it (all the time making sure he didn’t get hit by cars or attacked by dogs or other varmints or hit obstacles in the sidewalk) , even though it might hurt you to see the scraped knees and the tears, you know it makes them a stronger, more capable and resilient person.  The Government was structured to act in a similar manner – not to provide everything and bear all burdens, but to keep the villains out of the house while the family develops inside by learning from it’s experiences, some of which will be painful.

It is important to understand that there is no conflict between the idea of compassion and the idea of a limited central government and a prohibition of federal aid programs.  Current Federal officials will tell you otherwise, but it is only because they have trained themselves over many, many years to see it that way.

The Constitution provides for a Federal Government that is severely limited in scope and function.  A non-restricted central government that supposedly cares anything about it’s citizens must take on the role of provider when it takes on the role of controller.  A government system designed to place a powerful central authority will always work toward expanding its powers, always work towards increasing it’s authority.  If the citizens are lucky and have been assured that they have a voice and a vote, the central government will have to look like it is responsive, but in the end it will always expand it’s control, and will pay for it by providing a random and incomplete list of services for everyone.  But it provides for those services by taking from the citizens.  A double strike – loss of resources AND liberties.  And the inefficiency of a central government bureaucracy means the quality of service will be inferior as well.  Three strikes, you’re out.  But they are not – they are not out until they stop breathing.

It always starts with a helpful and compassionate sort – the kind of compassion that smothers instead of strengthens.  But that compassion cannot exist while analyzing the advanced needs of 300,000,000 people (or even 300,000, to be honest).  When you try to approach relieving certain sufferings or burdens at this level, you have to turn the people into a simple mathematical equation, and try to analyze what would be best for a group that size.  It may be able to be done if you are concerned about each person getting enough food – you can take an average caloric intake, err on the side of excess, and multiply by the number of people, and you will be able to provide a number of calories that needs to be purchased daily to support your population.  But add in food preferences, allergies and sensitivities, non-standard intake requirements, and you are faced with a problem that can still be solved, but now requires research teams, advanced analytical systems, all at a cost.  That is one of the simplest things you may need to do, and already at this scope it will cost more than the total paid by the individuals to purchase their own food.

Health care is a much more complicated situation.  The end result of a Federal Government run Health Care plan can be seen in this true example of a state-run program with a similar structure.  Barbara Wagner of Oregon was diagnosed in 2005 with lung cancer.  Treatments put the cancer into remission, but it returned in 2009.  With many children and grandchildren, she was determined to live as much life as she could.  A doctor suggested a drug that would slow down the growth of tumors and extend her life.  She tried to get the state health plan that covered her to help her with the drugs, which cost $4000 per month.  She was instead given the response that Oregon would not help her with her drugs, but if she opted for doctor-assisted suicide, the state would pick up the tab.  The drug manufacturer donated the drug to her for the remaining months of her life.  But the state medical officer was still untouched.  Here is his reply.  “We can’t cover everything for everyone. Taxpayer dollars are limited for publicly funded programs. We try to come up with policies that provide the most good for the most people.”

Why then is it mandatory to try to reform health care, to fix health care by putting in place a Federally controlled Government plan?  Our system, broken as it might be, is not as bad as it would be under those policies.  At least under our current system we treat and respect life because it is life, not only when it is producing money for our treasury.

This is the complete opposite of compassion.  Compassion would be to sustain those most needing sustenance, and allowing those most able to handle the problem themselves to do so.  But compassion is no longer the goal of a government that is taking more and more authority on itself daily.  It means to relieve itself of the burden of sustaining those who are no longer filling its coffers.  Like an insurance company, it will demand that you pay in full and on time, but it will take every opportunity to avoid paying on a claim.  Entitlement social programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, have long since lost their promise as a helping hand for the elderly and retired.  They are now coddled as a revenue source for any other program the Government wants to spend the money on.  And new entitlement programs will end up the same way.

Government doesn’t even have the self-control to be allowed to establish and protect individual retirement and health savings accounts.  Every time the government established something to do with money, that money simply gets absorbed by the government, and the government goes to great pains to explain that money is needed for the ever expanding amount of expense for the ever increasing number of services they provide.

The answer really is simple.  Limit the Federal government to only what it was given permission in the Constitution to do.  Have it submit it’s budget to a group of non-government auditing firms to validate, and tax enough to cover that budget.  Do not allow the expansion of programs, which leads to the depletion of funds, which leads to the taxpayers walking away empty-handed.  It cannot happen any other way – the only source of income from the Government is citizens tax dollars, and every time a new program is put in place (and old programs are never allowed to go away) the only way to begin to pay for it is more tax, and that initial proposed tax will never cover the expanding cost of the bureaucracy.

Now, what about the people tied into the program already.  Lets take an airline flight, for example.  An airliner takes off from it’s original destination with 20 people on board, it has enough fuel to get to it’s destination with those 20 people. But early on in the flight, the airline executives decide to be friendly to another 20 people and put them on the airplane as well, putting their destination first in line in order to convince them to pay their ticket price.  When they land the aircraft to board the extra 20 passengers, they put in enough fuel for 19, knowing there was some extra left in the tank from before.  Then they spend that money, and need more.  So they invite another 20 people – same deal – yours will be the straight through flight.  They land, board 20 people, discharge none, and tell the previous 40 there will be a delay in getting to their destination but please be patient.  Add enough extra fuel for 18 people, and take off now with 3 different destinations.  Do this a dozen more times.  Now you have 300 people in the air, 15 destinations, and suddenly you realize you are running low on fuel – you will NOT be able to make it to all the destinations.  Since they already spent all the ticket income, they can’t buy more fuel.  So they suggest selling another round of seats and buying fuel to last just until the next emergency.  Unfortunately, the emergencies are coming closer and closer to each other.  The airliner is beyond overweight, there is no way to get everyone to all their destinations even though they have paid fully for their travel, and the airline executives don’t want to face the consequences of stupid decisions.  The airline executives have some hard choices to make.  They know the best thing for their public image is to make it to the closest destination, play up the praise of the most recent 20 customers on their quick and direct flight, and have everything appear as if the airline is the model of efficiency and service.  But in order to do that, they have to find a way to get rid of the other destinations and the weight of the people going there.  This latest wave of entitlements equates to taking all the passengers who have been on the longest and have used most of the resources, and throwing them off the plane in midair over the ocean where they cannot be heard from, then landing and discharging 20 passengers.  And the Federal Government, justifying by saying “There is limited tax funding, we got them an airplane trip but we can’t pay for everything”, doesn’t feel bad about making this kind of ‘tough decision’.

The real solution?  In the case of the airplane, land the plane at the nearest airport, sell the fuel and the plane and use the proceeds to make sure your current passengers get to their destinations, and don’t take on any more passengers.  It becomes obvious that the airline is incapable of making the right kind of decisions to assure the delivery of the product as promised, so it should get out of the airline business.  Apply that to the Federal Government – keep them out of the entitlement business.  Stop expanding and changing the program, dismantle the structure and use the proceeds to get the people who have already paid in full their benefits, and stop taking on new dependants.  The Federal Government of the Untied States as established in the Constitution is based on a terrifying concept, a concept that people who feel they have to govern just can’t handle.  That concept is self-reliance.  Our Federal Government can’t look at a problem and stay out of it, allowing individuals to work it out.  They feel like they need to jump in and regulate, guide and govern the recovery from any problem.  And when they jump in, they always exert the bias of a powerful central government, and each solution gives them more and more power.  That has to stop.  The Constitution mandates that the Federal Government protect the concept of individual self-governance.  A simple return to the Constitution, and a dismantling of programs and Federal Government organizations that are not justified under a direct reading of the Constitution, is the only way to avert the imminent disaster facing the nation today.

Christopher Nogy