Corporate Welfare Corrupts Too

II have posted a number of times on the corrupting influence of the welfare state. Lest one should think that I merely have a vendetta against the poor, I am just as eager to condemn corporate welfare also. As John Stossell has noted,

In America today, the biggest recipients of handouts are not poor people. They're corporations.

While oil comampanies continue to receive $4 billion a year in subsidies, Stossell notes that other energy sectors are getting into the act. The Obama administration desires to direct billions in additional subsidies toward the construction of wind farms half owned by General Electric, the CEO of which happens to be "super-close" to President Obama.

The TARP program, to take another example, has rightly been characterized as "welfare for bankers." Not suprisingly, where there is money and power involved, there is corruption. One senator who voted for TARP put in a call for one of the banks in his constituency to get the TARP money.

You can tell a Congressman from a statesman by whether they are willing to eliminate income subsidies altogether or only for those people who they do not like. As the facebook statement by MoveOn shown above indicates, while those on the left rail against corporate welfare, they are eager to provide money taken from other people to be spent on government education, state bureaucracy, subsidized contraception and abortion, and rebroadcasts of British entertainment masquerading as educational television.  At the same time, way too often those on the right champion the elimination of food stamp programs, while helping their friends in "big business.". In fact, all government welfare schemes regardless of who is getting the loot are coercive wealth transfers from the productive to the politically favored. As such they violate the Christian ethic of private property and, therefore, are to be condemned. The entire welfare state, not in part but the whole, should be eliminated.