The 57 per cent

           According to a 2011 Health and Human Services report, of the 309, 467,000 people in the United States, fully 109,631,000 live in households that receive means tested welfare benefits.  There are an additional 55 million seniors who receive Social Security and Medicare benefits which brings the total of those who benefit from government largess to 164,000,000, 43 per cent of the total population.  Consider that the wage earners in the remaining 57 per cent of the population who work two and three jobs to support their families, are financially supporting the rest of us.

             The consequences go far beyond the unfairness of it all.  Nearly half of the population is not producing, not striving to fulfill dreams, not creating what they may have created spurred by want and need.  It’s a grand waste of human potential, and there is nothing more destructive to the soul than the waste of human potential. An Irish prayer says, “May there always be work for your hands to do.”  A Scottish proverb says, “If the Devil finds a Man idle, he'll set him at Work.”  Frederik Mises said, “Man can only derive life and enjoyment from a perpetual application of his faculties to objects, or from labor.”   We have unleashed demons onto the world. 

         But it gets worse.  Those 57 per cent are also funding billions of dollars in corporate welfare.  A $100 million for an airport in a town with 75 residents, 2 million for an internship program for one intern, $1.3 million to help Pepsi Cola build a yogurt plant in New York, billions of dollars to provide the pentagon with a biofuel that costs $424 a gallon.  And the list goes on and on and on.  Our founders are gasping in their graves.