A Culture of Dependency

by Austin Raynor

The likelihood of the new health care bill reducing the deficit or expanding coverage at a reasonable cost is, at best, doubtful. What is far from doubtful is that the bill will create a new class of citizens dependent on the government for important services.

Democrats utterly fail to question the value of creating dependents through entitlement extension. In the rhetoric of Obama and Pelosi the possible drawbacks of undermining independence and self-responsibility are conspicuously absent.

Republicans are equally to blame: although opposed to the current bill, it was under Bush that the immense prescription drug entitlement was added to Medicare. When the Democrats proposed a public option, the Republicans complained that it would siphon funds from Medicare!

Instead, the parties plow headfirst into a legislative agenda that piles entitlement on top of entitlement. In areas where direct welfare is not included the government still manages to inject itself as an agent in nearly every conceivable aspect of human life. The immense number of local, state, and federal regulations testifies to the ubiquity of government interference. How often do representatives consider repealing a law?

The dependency agenda is exemplified in almost every feature of Democratic policy. Stimulus programs have effectively nationalized large sectors of the economy. Obama’s repeated quashing of school choice reform has reduced educational freedom, especially for the underprivileged. At the same time that the recession has reduced private employment to 1990s levels, the bureaucracy (composed of people dependent on the government for their very livelihood) has actually grown.

Obama’s administration is currently working on creating a new poverty-measurement system which will ensure a permanent class of dependents. Under the current system (which essentially measures a basic standard of living), poverty definitions are tied to absolute purchasing power. Under the new system, the poverty tag would be affixed to those who earned less than a certain percentage of the average.

Thus, even if the income of every single American tripled, the poverty rate would not decrease, because proportional wealth distribution would not change. Under the old system, poverty could be eradicated merely through the efforts of people to improve their own conditions.

Under the new measurement criterion, however, the only plausible way to end poverty is for the government to engage in massive wealth reallocation to flatten society, minimizing wealth differences between the rich and poor. The new poverty measurement—totally untethered from actual economic deprivation—ensures that “poverty” is only a problem that can be solved by government.

Dependency does not come in the form simply of financial entitlements. It also makes itself felt when the government substitutes its own choices and value judgments for those of individuals. Drug prohibition, seatbelt enforcement, social security, and the banning of trans fats are but a few of the examples of such choice substitution coercively employed by government.

The attitude central to governmental overreaching is one of immense hubris. In the eyes of the planners of society, it is they who know best: the government knows better than the citizen how to plan for his retirement, how to manage his health care bills, which firearms are safe for him to use, and how to educate his children.

Consider, for instance, the words of Barack Obama in an interview with Katie Couric: “I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that’s not how it works in our democracy.

“Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.” For Barack Obama, the democratic process is merely a hindrance to the institution of his “elegant” plans for Americans and their lives.

Sadly, the socialist program is a self-perpetuating one. Entitlement expansion, by the very nature of the dependencies it creates, generates larger and larger classes of people unwilling to vote to scale back social welfare programs.

Handouts serve as an easy way for unprincipled candidates to attract economically uneducated voters with the promise of something for nothing (or something at someone else’s expense). And, as welfare benefits become engrained in the public mindset as something people are legitimately entitled to, the entire value structure of a society changes.

Social structures breed certain moral valuations. Socialism tends to the destruction of all the values on which an individualist society rests: thrift, hard work, voluntary charity and association, self-reliance, independence, and distrust of power.

As the face of society slowly alters under the weight of collectivist doctrine, the traditional moral genius of the classically liberal West will grow fainter and fainter. The values associated with personal responsibility cannot help but be reduced to rubble in a society that liberates one from responsibility both towards oneself and others. In a socialist society there are no incentives to look out for yourself or your fellow man: the government will do it for you.

As Samuel Adams put it so forcefully: “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”