The poor are to liberalism roughly what the proletariat is to Communism—a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power. What matters, for practical liberals, is not that (for example) the black illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled since the dawn of the Great Society; it is that a huge new class of beneficiaries has been engendered—beneficiaries who vote, and who feel entitled to money that must be taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised.... Corrupt politicians make headlines; but no honest politician dares to refer to the problem of corrupt voters, who use the state as an instrument of gain. And nobody identifies this sort of gain with greed. To hear liberalism talk (largely uncontradicted by conservatism), greed is exclusively a vice of private people operating in an economy of free exchange. Compassion is identified with redistribution by the state. Greed, in short, means capitalism, and compassion means socialism. —Joe Sobran
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 09:54:36 +0000
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