In Tuesday’s House of Representatives debate, Rep. Chris
van Hollen (D-MD) said that Congress had a responsibility to extend
unemployment benefits to those who are “unemployed through no fault
of their own.” Minority leader Nancy Pelosi used the same rhetoric
in a floor speech a week ago, saying that the Senate’s two-month
payroll tax and unemployment benefits band-aid “would secure a
critical lifeline for those who have lost their jobs through no
fault of their own.” The Democratic
Party’s website crows, “Democrats have provided
relief for hardworking Americans who lost their jobs through no
fault of their own.”
In a recent Michigan state legislature debate about
insurance reform, a Democrat state rep discussed “those, who
through no fault of their own, will lose insurance coverage…”
Democrats in Washoe County, Nevada, ruing the failure of the U.S.
Senate to pass the DREAM Act, said of illegal aliens who were
brought here as children, “These are young men and women who,
through no fault of their own, came to this country and consider
this country their own.”
It’s an interesting rhetorical device, one that allows
Democrats everywhere to sing from the same sheet of guilt-inducing
music. But, at the risk of sounding like Rick Perry’s “have no
heart” believers in liberty, limited government, and the power of
incentives, why should the question of fault be an important factor
in how the federal government treats adult Americans?
Charity is only charity if given willingly. Money taken by
threat of force, whether by a mugger or by government, is theft. As
for the latter, Frédéric Bastiat properly termed it “legalized
plunder.”
In his seminal work The
Law, published in 1850 just before Bastiat’s
death, the French economist elaborates on the proper role of
government and its “almost universal perversion.” Speaking of men’s
need to work to satisfy his wants and
needs:
Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain — and
since labor is pain in itself — it follows that men will resort to
plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this
quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor
morality can stop it.
When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes
more painful and more dangerous than labor.
It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to
use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency
to plunder instead of to work. All the measures of the law should
protect property and punish plunder.
…[T]he law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying
degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence
by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by
plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the
law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
The inclination to feel sorry for, and want to help,
someone who has lost his job is understandable. But when government
subsidizes unemployment for two years, it
discourages people from finding new jobs.
It’s not just common sense; the data show
it.
So the key question for policy makers should not be one of
fault. It should be one of economics, and perhaps of law and
justice. When I say “law and justice,” I do not mean to imply that
they are the same. Bastiat addressed this directly:
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater
change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into
an instrument of plunder.
What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would
require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content
ourselves with pointing out the most striking.
In the first place, it erases from everyone’s conscience
the distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a
certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make
them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the
citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense
or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal
consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose
between them.
The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much
the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one
and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to
believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so
widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are
“just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder
appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary
for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and
monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them
but also among those who suffer from them.
So why do Democrats keep mentioning the lack of fault of
beneficiaries of redistributionist largesse? In order to confuse
the non-socialist majority of Americans into believing that law and
justice are, in the case of these laws, the same. Two years of
unemployment benefits is no
more just than any other mugging is, regardless of
the law.
Furthermore, how does one draw a line between an
unemployed person who lost his job “through no fault of his own” or
someone who was simply not a very good employee? Do you really want
bureaucrats making that decision one day? And what about the
employer whose business was shrinking and thus he had to lay off
employees? How about paying them for profits that fell “through no
fault of their own”? No, there is no end to what might befall good
people through no fault of their own, but our nation is built on a
guarantee of a right to the pursuit of happiness, not a right to
other people’s money.
A perfect example of politicians “moving the line” to buy
votes followed by the inevitable result of massive redistribution
bureaucracies comes from SCHIP, the federal program that gives
matching funds to state health insurance systems that cover
uninsured children in moderately low-income households. In New
York, the legislature passed a law allowing SCHIP eligibility for
children in families up to 400% of the federal poverty
level — or about $89,000 for a family of four. It
also covers pregnant women, parents, and — wait for it —
childless adults. A 2007 Inspector General report
of New York’s SCHIP operations estimates that the state made
over 300,000 payments to ineligible recipients, totaling over $25
million in cost. Another quarter million payments totaling almost
$15 million were made without file documentation that “adequately
support[ed] eligibility.” And that was just the federal share
of the cost, and just for six months.
The results of these infrastructures designed to implement
legalized plunder on a massive scale do not change based on
“fault.”
But make no mistake: Overpayments — meaning excessive
theft from some citizens to give that money to other citizens —
are, for the left, a small price to pay. Indeed, they would see the
NY SCHIP outcome as preferable to the opposite, where eligible
people were not receiving taxpayer-funded benefits, whether through
fault of their own or not.
The more people become dependent on government, even if
they are not technically eligible to do so, the more they will vote
for politicians who promise to continue giving money for nothing
despite Margaret Thatcher’s warning that socialist governments
“always run out of other people’s money.”
A perfect example comes from a commenter on the far-left
web site
DemocraticUnderground.com: “…those who may
be unemployed or homeless because of some ‘fault’ of theirs —
whether illness, or a mistake, or bad judgement [sic] — why the
hell are these people any less worthy of help to
survive?”
That’s right: Someone who is unemployed because of bad
judgment is just as “worthy of help” — which is to say worthy of
some of your money — as anyone else. It’s pure and simple Marxism.
And it is exactly what Pelosi and van Hollen are selling us when
they want to extend unemployment benefits because some of the
recipients are in an unfortunate situation “through no fault of
their own.”
This particular Democrat rhetoric is the other side of the
coin from their routine claims that high unemployment was caused by
“the 1 percent” or “Wall Street” or some other evil
limousine-driven elites working hand-in-hand (and this part is
actually true) with government to rig the system in their benefit.
So, if the misdirection about “fault” isn’t enough to get
ordinarily anti-beggar-thy-neighbor Americans to play along with
socialism-lite, perhaps a misplaced desire for retribution will
be.
Bastiat’s analysis is again remarkably clear and
prescient:
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they
are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit
of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to
enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of
laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered
classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when
they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to
stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.
Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among
the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the
power to make laws! Until that happens, the few practice lawful
plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to
participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons. But
then, participation in the making of law becomes universal. And
then, men seek to balance their conflicting interests by universal
plunder. Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society,
they make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered
classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals
against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder. (This
objective would demand more enlightenment than they possess.)
Instead, they emulate their evil predecessors by participating in
this legal plunder, even though it is against their own
interests.
It is as if it were necessary, before a reign of justice
appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retribution — some for
their evilness, and some for their lack of
understanding.
Now, Bastiat never met Nancy Pelosi, so there is a
particularly subtle brand of evil that even he did not fully
anticipate. Legal plunder is not against the interest of Nancy
Pelosi and the Democratic Party because it is only by funneling as
much money as possible through the sticky fingers of government
(and unions) that they maintain political power.
Thus it is that Democrats continue to offer “through no
fault of their own” as a key reason to transfer money from one
American to another. Sadly, while House Republicans are correctly
opposing a two-month tax policy as more confusing than beneficial
(not that this misguided Keynesian tax cut is economically
beneficial anyway), Bastiat-like language is nowhere to be found.
It is a rare politician, even a “Tea Party” politician, who will
stand up in the well of the House and proclaim the immorality of
basing economic policy on mellifluous Marxist language like “fault”
and “need.” Our Republic is not safe until such language is no
longer vanishingly rare in public.
Fault is the wrong yardstick by which to measure the
appropriateness, either economically or morally, of government’s
tax and spending policies. Instead, the proper question is this:
Putting aside the claimed need for the money or lack of blame for
the need, is the government’s action really anything more than
legalized plunder?
