Welfare/Warfare

Joseph Sobran - Our State, Ourselves:

In truth, the welfare state and the warfare state are inseparable, because they are two aspects of the same thing, the state itself. Countless people depend on both for their income. Both expand inexorably. We always hear calls for emergency spending; there is no such thing as emergency saving. And ... emergencies — as defined by the state — just keep on coming.

In the days of monarchs, a man at least knew who the state was: the king. "L’etat, c’est moi," and all that. When there was a war, everyone knew it was the king’s war. When the king imposed taxes, everyone knew who was paying whom. It might be tyranny, but you knew what was what; there was no nonsense about self-government. Government meant some people ruling others.

But in the age of Democracy, people think, confusedly, that they themselves are the state, when they actually have no idea what the state is doing in their name--at least, not until it does it to them. An encounter with a bureaucrat may throw cold water on the notion that the government is "we." We no longer really know who it is. But whoever it is, we no more control our rulers than our ancestors controlled their kings.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This amorphous, global, bureaucratic empire has nothing to do with liberty, democracy, or self-government. Or the U.S. Constitution.