It is hard to complain about Obama’s $5 trillion in new debt when you added $5 trillion just before he did. “Well, we took eight years and he took only four” is not exactly a response that stirs the soul — particularly when the country took two centuries to amass the first $5 trillion.
Then there’s Medicare, which the GOP has made a pivotal election issue. The problem with Medicare is not just that its current formula is unsustainable, or that Obama diverted a staggering amount of projected future spending on it into yet another bank-breaking entitlement. It is that the national government is innately incapable of running an entitlement program. Is the election about the side that grasps this versus the side for which enough is never enough? Surely you jest.
As constituted, our government offered two visions of “providing for the general welfare.” First is the Madisonian principle that Congress’s capacity to tax and spend is strictly limited to its enumerated powers — which do not include running social-welfare programs. The second is a Hamiltonian gloss, giving Congress additional latitude, provided that its schemes benefit all Americans equally — which would preclude welfare programs that take from A for the benefit of B.
Once you abandon these moorings, once you accept a wealth-redistribution system in which government becomes the arbiter of “social justice,” the ball game is over. If government is given license to even the scales between the have-nots and the haves, the political incentive to even them will be constant and overpowering: Enough will never be enough. If the rationale for giving government this power is that the asset in question is corporate property, not private, what is to be the limiting principle? Why health care but not housing or income? And when it comes to providing for the truly needy among 310 million people, central-government planners will simply never be as good at it as decent societies and their local governments. And so the allocation of burdens and benefits in federal entitlement programs is guaranteed to be warped, wasteful, and ultimately unsustainable.
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