Income Redistribution Is About Votes, Not About Helping The Poor

Everyone knows the famous Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime. So why does the federal government spend so much money on giving away fish and so little on teaching people how to fish? Because Democrats want people to depend on government so that they will vote to re-elect them.

Think of all the redistributive programs we have to help people. The minimum wage, food stamps, housing subsidies, free cell phones, and Medicaid are just a few of the over eighty federal means-tested programs designed to help the poor. Social Security and Medicare redistribute income to the elderly. Federal disability insurance helps people who are too disabled to work. In total, the federal government redistributes about $2.5 trillion per year, which buys a lot of votes.

In contrast, policies that aim to create self-sufficiency are significantly fewer. Job training programs are the obvious example, as they are the epitome of teaching a person to fish. Yet the federal government spends only around $10 billion on job training programs which is less than one-half of one percent of the amount spent on redistributive programs. Other programs that qualify as self-sufficiency increasing are health savings accounts and private retirement programs (such as IRA and 401(k) accounts). These are large-scale programs but no federal spending is dedicated toward them unless one believes in counting the tax breaks they enjoy. If you count that cost, it is around $500 billion, or one-fifth of the amount that is redistributed.

The Democrat politicians don’t redistribute money to their voters because they want to improve their voter’s lives. The Democrats redistribute money to buy votes to improve THEIR OWN lifestyle.

Nancy Pelosi and her family aren’t living in a commune. Harry Reid and his family aren’t living in a shack. The Democrat politicians take money from some Americans and give it to other Americans so they can enrich themselves. There’s nothing noble about Democrat politicians. They are just thieves.

Dorfman is correctly pointing out what "progressives" have known, but have thought they disguised from ordinary Americans for several decades now through the use of various high-sounding euphemisms such as "war on poverty," etc.

There never was a "war on poverty"!

There was a war on "the People's" Constitutional limits on their elected representatives' use of coercive power to "take" and "redistribute" the people's earnings, under the guise of "helping" some.

Growing a voter base in order to retain power ceded to them by kind-hearted American citizens who could not distinguish between the merits of private charity and the dangers of coercive collective power has brought us to today's debt, deficits and endangered liberty for all citizens.

Perhaps a reading of Congressman Davy Crockett's (TN) experience might be a revealing exercise for those who don't see the dangers of turning over our individual responsibilities to those who promise to "help us."

The current Democrat appeal for "fair share" can be seen as "slavery" by another name. Government "masters" buy votes in exchange for retaining their "master redistributionist" status, while their "voters" yield up freedom for themselves and future generations.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis

Hear Samuel Adams:

"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams

And:

“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” - Samuel Adams

Income redistribution, regardless of the motive--which, of course, is about buying votes--is Government directed theft. In a moral society, you do not take the fruits of one person's labor to reward another to whom the first has no obligation. (Charity, where one voluntarily shares his achievements with another, is a very, very different phenomenon.)

Incidentally, on the subject of Welfare State programs, it is well to understand how the "safety-net," actually did work--believe it or not--when administered by the Church in Jefferson's Virginia (Jefferson On Welfare).

William Flax

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The problem is that most of our underclass does not really want to go fishing even if we were were to pay them to learn. Charles Dickens never wrote about the many ways that the poor can be their own worst enemies: illegitimate kids; crime; lotteries; drinking and drugs; “education is acting white”; unaffordable vacations, mortgages, and cars; kids running wild in school; trashing neighborhoods; etc. [Be free to add your own.]

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