Truthfully, that is NOT exactly what he said, but there is a point to my headline: Democrats think that social obligations should be fulfilled by the government.

The social insurance state was not originally intended to substitute government for family and church assistance to people in need but as a backstop to ensure that people without others to assist them didn't fall through the cracks. All else failing, the government would ensure that nobody starved to death or was left to rot on the side of the road. 

Civilized societies do not view people as disposable; smart societies do not try to substitute bureaucracy for the much more enlivening love and community that are necessary to sustain us. 

Wow. @Tim_Walz claims his mother waits for her social security check every month to feed herself.

Tim has a net worth of over $1 million, and yet has his 90 year old mom depending on her social security check for basic necessities like food.

What a piece of sh-t! pic.twitter.com/pIgAN5nw4r

— Bad Hombre (@joma_gc) October 17, 2024

Tim Walz's story about his mom is unintentionally revealing in this context. If we were to believe Tim, his mother would starve without her Social Security check arriving on time. 

That says more about Tim than about Social Security, the government, Donald Trump, Republicans, or whoever he is trying to make a point about. If this were literally true, Tim Walz is a monster. 

Of course, it is not LITERALLY true. First of all, you have to work hard to be food insecure in the United States. The only reason somebody becomes food insecure is that there is some fundamental dysfunction in the person or their caretaker. A child may have a drug-abusing parent, for instance, which is a tragedy, of course, but not a failure of society. We live in a country where, when people are in need, strangers will fly in helicopters and drop off food and supplies at the drop of a hat. 

So what Tim is really saying is something different: the government ought to be the primary caretaker for everybody, including his mother. He shouldn't have to care for her; caring is a job to be outsourced. 

That has been the ideological foundation of the welfare statists for over a century. It is a foundational principle of Marxism, which aims to substitute the state for the family. "It takes a village," as it were, because it shouldn't be the parents themselves who raise children or children who take care of their parents as they age. 

Child care centers substitute for families. Schools substitute for parents. Social workers determine your child's gender. Colleges teach morality instead of churches. The government is there to take care of you; in exchange, you only need to give your labor and your soul. 

Friedrich Engels, it turns out, was the real prophet of Marxism. Karl Marx believed in the economic inevitability of communism; Engles, on the other hand, believed that communism would come about through the destruction of the family and social institutions. It was a project, not a historical inevitability, although a project that runs in parallel with the historical inevitability of communism. 

Both Marx and Engels see family relationships as an artificial construct, and modern liberals basically concur. Walz has worked assiduously to undermine family ties here in Minnesota--children can liberate themselves from parents who disapprove of their gender transitions and become wards of the state. They call it a "trans sanctuary" state, but it is another way to divorce children from parents and substitute the state for parents. Schools keep secrets from parents; teachers substitute state morality for that taught at home and in churches. 

No doubt Tim Walz loves his mother and would not let her starve. But his message is clear: the state over the family. He assumes his rallygoers will sympathize with the notion that taking care of his mother is the state's responsibility, not react in horror at the notion he presents that she would languish in filth and starve were it not for a monthly check from the government. 

Social Security is here to stay. We have paid into it, and our economic security is tied to it, so my quibble is not that it needn't be run efficiently and reliably. I have paid into it for more than four decades, so I want my meager return on investment. 

But it appalls me to see a son so cavalierly describe his mother as nearly destitute without the government's help. This man is a governor, a candidate for Vice President, and a lifelong government employee. 

If his mother needed a basket of groceries, couldn't he help her out? 

It never occurred to him to answer that question.