01 November 2012 By Jacob G. Hornberger Mocking Mitt Romney's shifting positions on the
auto bailout, the New York Times editorializes
that the bailout turned out to be a huge success
because "nearly 1.5 million people are working as a
direct result of the bailout. G.M.'s American sales
continue to increase, and Chrysler said this week that
its third-quarter net income rose 80 percent." We begin with the proposition that thievery can
sometimes be tremendously successful for the thief.
Let's assume that a penniless robber robs a bank of
$10 million dollars and isn't caught. Obviously he's
now able to do things he couldn't do before. He buys
two new cars, thereby increasing employment in the car
industry. He does the same in the home-construction
business by purchasing a new mansion. He opens a
successful business, hiring dozens of people. He
donates money to the poor. Defenders of the theft can point to the robber and
say, "Look at all the good that has come out of that
robbery. Praise theft!" Do you see anything wrong with this picture? One thing involves moral principles. Theft is wrong
in a moral sense, even if the thief benefits from the
money and does nothing but good things with it. The
money belongs to the owner. He's entitled to it
regardless of how he uses it. The thief has no moral
right to take the money from the owner, even if the
thief plans to do wonderful things with the money. That's a moral blind spot that afflicts statists,
at least when government enters the picture. For them,
if it's the government doing the stealing and
redistributing, then it's not immoral at all. Instead,
for the statists, it is the epitome of goodness. Consider the auto bailout. Where did the money come
from? Contrary to popular opinion, the federal
government is not a fountain of wealth. It doesn't
produce anything. Instead, it is parasitic in nature.
It gets its money by confiscating (taxing) wealth from
the private sector. Thus, in order to give money to the auto companies,
the government must first take it from people who are
working in the private sector. In doing so, it is
taking money from people to whom it belongs in order
to give it to big corporations to whom it does not
belong. For statists, that's no problem. For them, the
taking and redistribution reflect how good the
politicians and bureaucrats are. If anyone objects,
he's labeled a bad, selfish, no-good type of person.
Moral principles are one of the major dividing
lines between libertarians and statists. Libertarians
adhere consistently to moral principles, not just with
respect to private conduct but also governmental
conduct. For statists, moral principles go out the
window when government is doing the stealing (or
murdering, kidnapping, torturing, assassinating,
etc.). But that's not the only blind spot that statists
have. They are also unable to recognize the unseen
economic consequences of a government dole. Their
mindsets are focused on what is seen rather than on
what is unseen. The Times' position on the auto bailout is a
classic example of this phenomenon. The Times'
editorial board points to the auto companies and
exclaims: Look at how well they're doing with the
money that the government has given to them; this
shows that taking money from people to whom it belongs
and giving it to people who need it more really does
work. But what about the people from whom the bailout
money was taken? What happened to them as a
consequence of having that money taken from them? How
many marginal firms went out of business because that
much-needed money was taken from them? How many people
were put out of work owing to the fact that people in
the private sector weren't allowed to spend and invest
their money they way they wanted. Let's assume, for example, that thousands of people
planned to buy new television sets. Before they made
the purchases, the government took their money from
them and gave it to the auto companies. What happened
to the television industry? It didn't make the sales.
It didn't expand production. It didn't hire new
people. Since those things never happened, we don't see
them. Even the new people who were never hired in the
television industry don't know how the bailout
affected their lives. But through reason, thought, and
analysis, we can see that a government dole has unseen
economic consequences by virtue of taking money from
one group of people and transferring it to another
group of people. There is another factor to consider. Think of the
hundreds of millions of dollars that the auto
companies have paid in income taxes for the last
several decades to fund the welfare-warfare state. If
all that money had not been extracted from the auto
companies, they would have a nest egg of billions of
dollars to draw upon. With all that money, they
wouldn't have needed a government bailout. The fact
that the government has taken all that money from them
to fund its welfare-warfare operations for the past
several decades has left the auto companies (and
everyone else in the private sector) significantly
poorer than they would be had there been no
welfare-warfare state and income tax to fund it. Finally, we mustn't forget the mindset of
dependency that the statists have inculcated in the
American people with the welfare-state way of life. As
soon as things go wrong, as they inevitably do from
time to time, the first thing many Americans now do is
call on the government to take someone else's money
and give it to them. Thus the welfare state not only
violates moral principles, it also damages the traits
of self-reliance and independence as well as spirit of
benevolence that comes in a libertarian society. The Times concludes, "What Mr. Romney cannot
admit is that all this is a direct result of the
government investment he would have rejected." Maybe that's true. But what the New York Times
cannot acknowledge are the horrible consequences that
the welfare-state way of life has had on the American
people, morally, economically, and spiritually. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the
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