As we continue to watch Congress and the executive branch discuss a Covid stimulus package, keep in mind that the government does not have any of its own money. It simply collects OUR money via taxes and then manages it.
Government representatives, whom we the people, who have consented to be governed, have elected to act on our behalf and at our behest, are charged with the task of managing collected taxes for uses we approve.
When you receive a stimulus check, it is not coming from a fairy godmother. It is coming from taxes we have already paid as well as astronomical increases to the national debt – a debt which currently exceeds $27 trillion and which our children and grandchildren will one day have to address.
Before you get excited about the prospect of the government depositing a $600 check or a $2,000 check into your bank account, consider how these continued “relief” payments, which are nowhere near enough to “bail out” Americans suffering from months of closed and suppressed business, bring our country closer to socialism and further from capitalism. The stimulus payments can be rightly considered a redistribution of wealth and condition Americans to appreciating the delivery of money to them from the federal government. Proponents of socialism in our own country have been vocal about supporting universal income, and some regions have already begun pilot programs and studies to implement guaranteed income. Stimulus checks move America in that direction. No wonder Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, (D-Calif.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders, (I-Vt.), among others, applauded President Trump’s Dec. 22 call for larger checks to be cut for Americans.
From a capitalist perspective, it is far superior for hard-working citizens in a free market to earn their own money than for citizens to pay higher and higher taxes which the government can then dole out to whomever it declares deserves or needs it. We have already seen in recent months how government agencies have employed Critical Race Theory and similar tools to determine who should receive jobs, funds and vaccines, so it is reasonable to believe those practices would continue and increase if America were to move further into socialism, meaning that collected taxes and wealth are then redistributed according to secular and often racists rubrics.
Justin Haskins, editorial director of The Heartland Institute, wrote in March 2020 about how the stimulus packages the government wants to pass are inching our nation closer to socialism by redistributing wealth collected through taxation and by manipulating the economy through actions of the Federal Reserve.
The entire article is worth the few minutes it takes to read, but below are a few highlights. Read through these excerpts and think about whether that extra $600 you could gain in the short term is worth the loss of freedom and free markets we may see in the long term.
“…as difficult as it might be for some to believe, if we continue down this road of printing a seemingly endless amount of cash to solve all our problems, socialism is exactly where we're going to end up…”
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"The U.S. federal government is broke – and when I say "broke," I mean living in the dumpster behind the Chinese food restaurant broke. At last count, the federal government is already $23 trillion in the hole. It doesn't have any money to buy toilet paper for government buildings, never mind enough to spend tens of billions of dollars to bail out airlines.
"So, how does Congress do it, then? The simple answer is that the federal government steals – eh, I mean taxes – trillions of dollars from hardworking Americans and then fills in the rest by issuing bonds that the Federal Reserve happily buys with the money it prints, money that is backed by nothing more than the "full faith and credit" of the very same government issuing the bonds in the first place. (Suddenly, Charles Ponzi doesn't look so bad, huh?)"
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"The federal government then burns through the cash by expanding and adding government programs – including stimulus packages – it can't afford. This cycle repeats year after year after year, allowing the government to get progressively bigger and more powerful."
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"If we continue down this dangerous path, it's only a matter of time before we have full-blown socialism in the United States, especially since it seems unavoidable that crises like the one we're facing today will continue to be used as a justification for further power-grabs."
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"This is what twenty-first century socialism looks like. The national government isn't going to go door to door confiscating homes and businesses and throwing people into gulags – well, at least not at first. It's much easier to have a central bank like the Fed control the currency and bankroll a national government's takeover of the economy through a never-ending stream of new government initiatives, bailouts, and massive services."
Read Haskins’ full March 23, 2020 article here: