The Welfare State: No Mercy For the Middle Class
Excerpts
The cruelty of liberals - "No one has the right to take one penny you've earned without your approval. Yet welfare-state liberals presume the right to steal up to 50% of your money in taxes.. . It's liberals who are cruel and vicious. They have no mercy for the middle class, no mercy for those who work and struggle to pay for liberals' alleged compassion. It's so easy to be noble with other peoples' money."
The arrogance of liberals - "Liberals don't ask you to pay for entitlement programs. Instead, they point a tax gun at you and say, 'your money or your life.'"
Safety net - "If we dismantled the Welfare State, we could still have a safety net. A free economy can give us unemployment insurance, low-cost health insurance, and a nest egg for our retirement. It would also create millions of new jobs and opportunity for everyone."
Entitlements - "Welfare, food stamps, farm subsidies, corporate subsidies, and thousands of other entitlements aren't rights. They're handouts that liberals give to some people by robbing others. So an economic 'right' is not a right at all. Instead, it's simply a license to steal."
Compassion - "Liberals turn our natural compassion into a moral and political duty—they turn compassion into compulsion."
Progressive income tax - "The progressive income tax is morally obscene because it's a tax on virtue. The more you earn, the more you pay. The harder you work, the more government confiscates from you. Your ability determines your punishment."
Environmental regulations - "From the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, hundreds of thousands of brave Americans have died fighting to defend our freedom. Yet today, with little protest, we throw our liberty into the gutter for the sake of rats, owls, and wetlands swamps."
Environmentalists' doomsday predictions - "Environmentalists' doomsday predictions would be comical, if it wasn't for the fact that their scare stories have frightened local, state, and federal legislators into creating a massive, poisonous layer of regulations. Environmental regulations violate our property rights, restrict our personal liberties, threaten our standard of living, and throw thousands of Americans out of work."
Middle-class - "My book is a moral defense of the middle-class. It defends those who work hard, take responsibility for their lives, and ask nothing from government but to leave them alone to pursue their dreams."
Health-care crisis - "We have a crisis because our health-care system is part of the Welfare State. Medicare and Medicaid are out-of-control entitlement programs, and government regulations strangle the health care industry . . . . A festering mountain of regulations adds hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of doing business for doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies. The unconscionable cost of these regulations is then passed on to us, the hapless consumer of government-controlled medical care."
Regulations - "Today, a constant stream of new regulations, imposed on a widening circle of industries, robs consumers, causes chronic long-term inflation, strangles our economy, and throws millions of Americans out of work."
Consumer protection laws - "Consumer protection regulations reveal liberals' ignorance of the moral values and practical skills needed to succeed in business: honesty, integrity, perseverance, intelligence, long-range vision, and the willingness to take risks. A free economy brings out the best in people and makes them live up to their highest potential. Welfare-state liberals presume they have the right to control this moral, dynamic economic system with snooping bureaucrats and regulations backed by force, threats, and massive fines."
Food and Drug Administration – "The real problem is that the FDA makes it risky to develop these [new] drugs. The real problem, therefore, is that the FDA exists in the first place. If we abolished the FDA, drug companies wouldn't have to spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get a drug approved. They would develop orphan drugs without needing a special monopoly. Fierce free-market competition would then drive [drug] prices down."
Business profits protect consumers - "It's true that businesses only care about profits, but that's exactly why they have to care about people. A company makes profits by selling goods or services we want. If we don't like a product, we won't buy it. If we think the product is unsafe, unhealthy, or doesn't work, we won't buy it . . . It's therefore in a company's self-interest to offer a safe, high-quality product. The company's profits and survival depend on consumers choosing its products over those of its competitors."
Bureaucrats - "A bureaucrat has no personal self-interest in protecting us. He'll keep his civil-service job and salary whether he protects the consumer or not. Bureaucrats don't care about us because our spending decisions don't affect them in the least."
The guilt trip - Liberals know we have natural humanitarian feelings, and they play on this. They tell us we're mean or selfish if we don't vote for their programs. Liberals replace our parents in our subconscious minds, feeding on our guilt and pushing us to vote for ever more . . . .entitlement programs. We can end this manipulation only when we realize that there's nothing wrong with being selfish."