"Mandatory" Federal Spending

[Keep in mind that I wrote these passages about federal spending before the economic meltdown.]

Two-thirds of the [2005] federal budget – roughly $1.5 trillion – is devoted to “mandatory spending,” a label commemorating the fact that these programs are permanently embedded in the federal statutes and do not require recurring approval. Most prominent among these are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – programs that redistribute wealth from one portion of Americans to another.*

This “mandatory spending” is more aptly perceived as “forbidden spending,” not only because it lacks constitutional authorization, but even more fundamentally because the forcible transfer of wealth from some private citizens to others represents the worst type of democratic invasion of individual rights. Even the States, whom the Constitution does not forbid from this type of activity, historically characterized the redistribution of wealth as an odious and illegitimate practice. As Thomas Jefferson explained it:

To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

More disconcerting is the fact that many Americans today believe that they have a right to receive this stolen wealth, that they enjoy a so-called entitlement to extract the fruit of their neighbors’ toil, a mindset comparable to that of the slaver and unworthy of a people calling themselves free. Modern developments in the law have encouraged this sick notion by crafting the concept of the “new property.” Whereas the “old property” dealt with one’s rights to goods and services voluntarily exchanged with another person, the “new property” deals with one’s supposed right to receive streams of income from the public purse. For this reason it is nearly impossible to terminate public spending, since the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom has determined that many of the recipients thereof have a constitutional “due process” right to other people’s money and cannot be deprived of it until a full hearing is held.

This ritualized robbery will end regardless of whether the government wants it to or not. Medicare and Social Security bear an unfunded liability in the neighborhood of $45 trillion, and as Americans continue to live longer and eat larger, they will consume an ever increasing share of the federal budget until there remains nothing left to steal. Current officeholders have no vested interest in sacrificing present political goals for future benefits, so in the face of this gathering threat, they suicidally propose to expand “entitlements” to such things as prescription benefits or “universal health care.” As French King Louis XV remarked during the generation preceding his own country’s revolution, “it will last my time, and after me, the deluge.” Our “entitlement” gluttony will also bring about a deluge, and perhaps sooner than anyone would like to contemplate.