It has been widely noted that one of the presidential candidates, Mr. Romney, made some remarks about the "47 per cent" of Americans that do not pay taxes and receive government benefits. Although I understand what Mr. Romney was saying, his statement was somewhat inaccurate and the data should be understood correctly, as well as some of the logical flaws in interpreting that information.
It is correct that nearly half of Americans do not pay federal income tax. This data comes from the Tax Policy Center, and is an estimation. The data can be interpreted several ways, but it is important to remember that most of these workers will be paying other taxes such as Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.
Secondly, it is not correct to state that half of Americans receive government benefits; what is correct is that 49 per cent of American households have someone there who receives a government benefit. This information comes from the Census Bureau. Finally, it is important to realize that these two halves of American society are not all the same people.
Having said that, these numbers are very disturbing, and they are steadily increasing. The number of households that receive government assistance has increased from 30% in 1983. And this trend is part of a larger desire on the part of our fellow citizens to avoid suffering at any cost, even to the point of economic collapse of the country. We simply do not have the ability to endure hardship, or even the risk of hardship, that our predecessors had.
We have heard of the Pilgrims and the death of 45 of the 102 settlers during that first winter. Our founding fathers endured unimagineable hardships in beginning this country, and settlers braved dangers and disease while exploring our fledgling nation from shore to shore. The original colonists were willing to fight and to die simply to be free of the demands of England.
When you look at military conflicts, there were 800,000 American deaths in the Civil War; 300,00 in World War I; 450,000 in World War II; 30,000 in the Korean Conflict; and 50,000 in Vietnam. Today, the loss of less than 10,000 brave soldiers in our Middle Eastern conflicts seems too terrible to bear by comparison.
The one thing that all of these stories have in common was the desire for freedom. The hardships endured and the battles fought were to be free of governmental oppression in one form or another. For the Pilgrims, it was to be free of a religion dictated by government. For our Revolutionary War leaders, it was to be free of the economic oppression of the British government. And the subsequent wars and tragic deaths were to preserve the liberties of this nation and others against those who would seek to attack us and enslave others.
The opposite of freedom is enslavement, but we do not often think of enslavement as voluntary. In fact, in the Old Testament times, slaves were released of their obligations after six years; yet if a slave desired to remain a slave he could do so in a ceremony described in Exodus 21:5-6. What leads us to voluntary enslavement today is our desire for security. It is our overwhelming need for security that causes us to trade away our freedoms.
No one identified this problem better than Friedrich Hayek in his book, The Road to Serfdom, wherein he described the almost inevitable decline of western societies. The demands of the public are initially for some form of security, even at the cost of liberty for others. Government intervention results in chaos, leading to demands for more controls, and eventually to economic dictatorship. The dependency on entitlements enslaves those who rely on the government, and those who work to pay the taxes are in servitude to the government for their labor. In fact, Tax Freedom Day comes after April 15; Americans who are working and paying taxes essentially donate all of their earnings from January 1st to April 23 to pay off their federal, state and local taxes.
Our country functioned without an income tax for nearly one hundred and fifty years before the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913. We went from being a third-world sized economy to being the world's economic leader during that time. We now have more debt than any nation has ever accumulated, and our nation is set to be permanently enslaved to that debt. Our dependency class, our working class, and our country are therefore all in bondage because of the demand for cradle-to-grave security. We insist on being provided food, economic assistance, unemployment benefits, college education loans, and healthcare, and for every person who is dependent on these things, someone else had to work and earn income that they do not get to keep. Whereas our forefathers dedicated their lives to being free of the compulsions of government, we willingly slip into the embrace of security provided by a bureaucracy.
No one wants to suffer hardships, but as Dr. Thomas Sowell has so often observed, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And what we are trading off here is individual and national freedoms for security. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety."
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