It amuses me whenever I hear President Trump and his fellow Republicans excoriating Democrats Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other leftists for being socialists. After all, let’s not forget that Trump and Republicans, along with their Democratic cohorts, are fierce advocates of America’s premier socialist program, Social Security.
Contrary to popular opinion, especially among seniors, Social Security is not a retirement program. No one “contributes” into a Social Security retirement fund, which then earns interest, and then is later available during one’s retirement years. Moreover, there are no individual lockboxes at Fort Knox with each person’s name on them containing his Social Security “contributions.”
Social Security is nothing more than a socialist program, no different from food stamps and public housing. It uses government to forcibly take money from people to whom it belongs and gives it to people to whom it does not belong. That’s classic socialism, in that it embodies the Marxian principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that the idea of Social Security originated among German socialists in the latter part of the 1800s. That was when the Progressive movement was striving to move America in a socialist direction.
That’s also why the Social Security Administration has a bust of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck on its website. Having acquired the idea of Social Security from German socialists, Bismarck was the German leader who enacted it into law in Germany.
In the 1930s, the Democratic presidential regime of Franklin Roosevelt enacted Social Security into law in the United States. It’s worth noting that the American people had lived without this socialist program for some 150 years before Roosevelt imported it to America.
Why don’t Republicans like to hear this sort of thing? Because they have convinced themselves that they are “capitalists” and that leftists are “socialists.” Obviously, the ardent support of Social Security on the part of the right doesn’t fit well within that scenario. Thus, conservatives would rather just play like it doesn’t exist.
That’s one of the reasons why conservatives dislike us libertarians. We make them confront their life of the lie. We make them see that they are just as socialist as the socialists they love to decry.
The left says that Social Security payments are too low. Leftists point out that many seniors have no savings and, therefore, are hopelessly dependent on the Social Security dole.
What the left ignores, however, is why seniors have no savings. The answer is simple: throughout their work lives, the federal government plundered and looted them through income taxation and inflation to fund the ever-growing expenditures of the federal welfare-warfare state that both conservatives and liberals support.
In other words, both the left and the right impoverish people to fund their socialist, interventionist, and imperialist programs and then say, “We need a dole for the seniors because they don’t have any money left.”
But where does the money come from to fund Social Security? It comes from the younger members of society — those who are still working. They are the ones who are now being impoverished to fund Social Security, Medicare, education grants, farm subsidies, foreign aid to dictators, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the NSA, the forever wars, and all of the other ever-growing expenditures of the welfare-warfare state way of life that both conservatives and liberals foisted upon our land many decades ago.
The worst part of Social Security, however, is not its financial bankruptcy or even the mindset of dependence it inculcates within people. The worst part is its destruction of liberty and its moral bankruptcy.
Like other socialist programs, Social Security is based on the concept of mandatory charity and political stealing. It forces people to be good, caring, and compassionate by taking their money and giving it to others.
Force and charity are opposites. When a person is forced to be good, caring, and compassionate, he is not being good, caring, and compassionate. He is instead having his freedom and moral values destroyed.
Freedom entails the right to decide for one’s self whether to be good, caring, and compassionate. Everyone has the right to decide for himself whether to care for others, including his parents, grandparents, and other seniors. That’s why our American ancestors lived without socialism for more than a century.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Social Security is the message that it sends to young people it is plundering, looting, and impoverishing. The message is: “You young people are bad people. You can’t be trusted to take care of your parents, grandparents, and others in need. You need to be forced to do so.” Sadly, through indoctrination, all too many young people have come to believe that that message to them and about them is true.
Written by Jacob G. Hornberger for The Future of Freedom Foundation ~ October 11, 2019
