A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief post discussing
why it is so hard for politicians to cut spending, even if they wanted to. I noted that there is what seems to be an ever-increasing percentage of our population receiving a significant portion of their income from the government.
Robert Higgs has just provided additional
excellent commentary affirming this very point. Using data compiled at the Heritage Foundation, Higgs notes,
[I]n 1962, 21.7 million persons depended on the programs they included in
their index for benefits. By 2009, the corresponding number of
dependents had grown to 64.3 million. Adding dependents not included in
the Heritage study might easily increase the number to more than 100
million, or to more than a third of the entire population. Thus, the
parasites verge ever closer to outnumbering their hosts.
This is shockingly scary. As I said in my earlier post, turning society back toward a free society and the prosperity that follows will require an ever-growing segment of the population to vote out of moral conviction and less out of pecuniary interest. It requires repentance.
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