December 15, 2003

An inevitable consequence of socialism is the division of society into two groups; those who are consuming government ‘services’ and those who are paying for them. As the waning and collapse of socialist countries around the globe has clearly demonstrated, those who consume eventually overwhelm those who provide. And since the providers must be increasingly coerced to participate, in the long run you cannot have a hybrid free/socialist government. Socialism is a political cancer in which one entitlement program will ultimately have the same effect upon the country as one cancer cell will upon the body. The problem with both these diseases is that they take on lives of their own, independent of the host. Every entitlement program the government ever instituted has or soon will metastasize into an open ended endowment that politicians can incrementally expand to buy votes; “vote for me and we’ll take care of you, too.”

The best illustration of this point is the history of Social Security. Over the course of its existence this program has gone from an opportunistic excuse to institute a new tax during the depths of the great depression, to an out-of-control, inoperable political malignancy that has literally changed our entire system of government. Originally sold to the public as a way for each worker to financially invest in his or her own retirement it quickly degenerated into a means by which the federal government provides the basic necessities of existence to tens of millions of citizens using other people’s taxes to do so. In a nutshell, socialism. And now the Political Machine is going to add on a $400 billion entitlement to prescription medicine.

First of all, let’s be realistic. The $400 billion figure is a scam, a pipe dream. Medicare alone is almost 10 times more expensive than we were told it would be and the whole Social Security program must by now be over 100 times more costly then predicted. A far more likely estimate of this so-called ‘benefit’s’ cost would be at least two trillion dollars.

Worse yet is that the language of the prescription drug bill prohibits the government from using the scale of its enormous new pharmaceutical obligations as leverage to get a lower price from the manufacturers. It also maintains the current restrictions against importation of low cost foreign made generic drugs. The politically well connected drug and health care cartels have been guaranteed that America will buy their products no questions asked and that the market will remain closed to competition. It is of course no coincidence that these two industries are major contributors to the politicians in both the Republican and Democrat divisions of the American Political Machine. Once again it is much cheaper and enormously more profitable for the special interests to purchase the regulatory favors of Washington’s political harlots than to compete in a fair, unsubsidized, marketplace. The military-industrial complex has been joined by the Social Security-health care-pharmaceutical complex.

The 2002 annual report of The Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund suggests that today’s children could be paying more than 52 percent in payroll tax just to fund elderly benefits. And that does not include the financial disaster of the ‘prescription drug benefit’. We must also remember that, official titles aside, there is no Social Security and Medicare trust fund. There are no accounts anywhere containing the accumulated taxes already taken from earnings to fund Medicare, Medicaid or, indeed, any part of the Social Security program at all. All the money that was taken in was spent long ago. All the money that now must be raised will either come from borrowing or directly from future taxes.

Keeping in mind that drug and long term care providers will be sheltered from the realities of a free market, the logistics of the prescription drug benefit become even more frightening. Every prescription that is filled creates the need for the next one to be filled. Every malady that is relieved by our children’s taxes opens the door for the next, progressively more expensive infirmity. To be ‘saved’ from the ravages of heart ‘disease’ is to be almost guaranteed a case of cancer or the pathetic degeneration of Alzheimer’s; therefore the next entitlement that will have to be offered will be to nursing home and long term hospital care. After all, if the system has kept someone alive long enough to become utterly dependent upon others we can’t just leave them on the curb. Under the existing provisions of Medicare and Social Security the assets of these hordes who now exist on what is essentially government administered life support will be channeled away from the people and into the clutches of the Political Machine and its associates. Our children and grandchildren will not only be virtual tax slaves for the greater glory of socialism but the accumulated wealth and property of our families will be consumed by a system of forced dependence. About the only thing that could make such an exploited existence bearable would be a steady supply of some of those new, mood altering drugs that the pharmaceutical industry seems to come out with every week or so. Especially if they were ‘free’

Then there is the question of responsibility. Should those to whom self respect is a virtue be forced to pay the unending medical bills of the obese or the alcoholic or those addicted to tobacco? To be ‘fair’ the government must therefore regulate the individual’s life with an eye toward the political realities of socialism. The enormous expansion of medical entitlements will lead to an equally enormous assault upon the right of the individual to live as they wish. After all, if you choose to live in an unhealthy manner then you are forcing others to be taxed unfairly; hence, you only really have the ‘right’ to live in a way most convenient for others. And for the sake of simplicity, “a way most convenient for others” will mean “a way most convenient for the State.”

Thus do people give up their liberty and the futures of their children in pursuit of the government handout. There is very little difference between the simple savage trading ancestral territories for shiny and colorful trinkets and the simple citizen who would trade their descendant’s birthrights for a chance to extend their dependent existence at the expense of anyone but themselves.

There is, of course, one difference; the simple savage doesn’t know any better.

©2003 Lee Robinson

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