Free Lunch

It came to me the other day that the problem we really have in our country today, the world for that matter is the concept that the government can “give” someone anything.  People want to believe the government can give them things, things they “deserve.”

The problem is that the government has nothing to “give” that it has not taken at the point of a gun from its citizens and other residents.  The government can only take from those who produce to fund those who do not.  Thus, with welfare and its cousins, government encourages those who do not produce and discourages those who do produce.

When we established this government, a government of the people, by the people, for the people was a servant of the people, those who worked for it were termed public servants.  Servant, a term used for those who serve at the pleasure of their masters.

We now have a government which is not elected, a bureaucracy which is self-contained and self sustaining, which makes not law, but regulation which has the force of law and is answerable to no one.  We elect representatives based on what they claim they can “give” us from the government coffers. 

There is no free lunch.  I can buy you lunch, you can buy me lunch.  The lunch is not free, even if the restaurant buys it for us.  Someone has to pay.

Someone has to pay for everything.  So, if society is to be successful, everyone has to work to pay for what they want and what they need.

This problem has been around since Cicero wrote his message:

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the “new wonderful good society” which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean "more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious".”

― Marcus Tullius Cicero

and since Paul wrote his second letter to the Thessalonians, Chapter 3, Verse 10:

… if any would not work, neither should he eat.

The current president got in to office and intends to stay in office by offering your money to those who don’t feel like going to work.

If we do not return to a Constitutional Republic, we will founder, consider the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”