The power to tax is widely accepted but fundamentally coercive. And the higher the taxes, the greater the coercion.
Outlawing mutually agreed upon prices between sellers and buyers — as both President Trump and former Vice President Harris proposed at some point — is also coercive, as are Trump’s tariffs, the first iteration of which were largely accepted by Biden.
In 1996 a Republican Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, a bipartisan bill imposing a work requirement of 30 hours a week for households with at least one working-age parent and 35 hours a week for households with two parents as a condition for receiving benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Today, inflation-adjusted federal welfare spending is 2.7 times its 1996 level, the budget deficit is nine times as high, and the federal debt is four times as large. Polling data show unprecedented support for work requirements. Yet the welfare reform in the House reconciliation bill, which is now pending in the Senate, merely requires 20 hours a week as a condition for able-bodied working-age adults with no dependents to receive Medicaid and expands the current 30-hour requirement of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to more beneficiaries. Why are these GOP work requirements weaker than those a Democratic president backed?
Though almost 80% of 2024 Trump voters support more work requirements for childless, able-bodied adult Medicaid recipients, GOP representatives from competitive districts seem to believe that since more low- and moderate-income Americans are voting for their party, Republicans should be generous with benefits. But it seems unlikely that welfare recipients opposed to work requirements would have voted for the GOP in the first place. And there’s no way Republicans can hold on to voters seeking handouts in the long term. Democrats always win a spending race.
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What is fair about taxing working Americans to give money to able-bodied people who refuse to work? Such a policy hurts both groups, trapping the latter in welfare dependency. Work is the ticket to opportunity and advancement.
A vote against controlling welfare spending today is a vote for raising taxes tomorrow. Social Security and Medicare face insolvency within eight years, the public debt is exploding, and the federal government spends roughly 70% of unobligated general revenues—total revenue not counting taxes and fees dedicated for specific purposes and interest payments on the federal debt—on social-welfare programs.
Art Diamond applauds T.J. Rodgers’s case against computer-chip industrial policy.
Both the left and the right are collectivist and opposed to the individualism of classical liberalism and libertarianism. This distinction between collective and individual choices seems to be the main line of fracture in modern ideologies.
Back in 2016, Julian Adorney unpacked one of the many reasons why smaller government is better than bigger government. Two slices:
It’s a lot easier to trust and champion big government if you assume that government is something that we all have a say in. But the fact is that, as an individual, your say is so miniscule that it doesn’t matter. The federal government will pass new laws and regulations regardless of what you want.
Many people accept this but argue that votes still matter in the aggregate. It’s true that, if 100,000 more people had voted for Clinton in a swing state like Pennsylvania, that could have had a big impact. But most of us don’t control 100,000 votes. Government is actually responsive to the kinds of people who can deliver thousands of votes (union bosses, heads of SuperPACs), but this is very different from being responsible to the average voter. We trust an institution that’s not accountable to us.
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The market puts each of us in the driver’s seat: every day we can vote with our dollars, and each vote matters a lot. By contrast, politics pushes us into the passenger seat and most often the driver doesn’t care what we want.
If we really want a society responsive to the people, we need smaller government and free markets.
Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler reflects on the Fourth of July in the United States. A slice:
But beyond parades and fireworks and funnel cakes, defining the American identity is lost in the woods. It’s more than football or Beyoncé or Marvel movies or Caitlin Clark—let alone B-2 bombers and bunker busters.
For me, it starts with freedom. Individualism. A nation of builders (American for entrepreneur). A certain ruggedness and resilience with an extra-large dollop of dignity, caring and giving. Martin Luther King Jr. thought the American dream required “a tough mind and a tender heart.” I like that.
One has to be careful.
The promise was not that the juice was free.
Rather, the promise was that the juice would be given away and someone ELSE would pay for it.
The problem with socialism is always that at some point you run out of “other peoples’ money”
