The InsIder Fall 05
What We Believe
Most modern Americans view gov-
ernment handouts as natural and
necessary. We happily endorse
payments for the poor, to the rich, for
the middle class, to college students,
for apple growers, opera lovers, cotton
farmers, electricity consumers, feminist
poets, and endless others. People may
quibble about the exact operation of
these subsidies, and some worry about
their aggregate cost. But practically no
one questions their premise—that it is
right for government to make grants of
taxpayer funds to individuals, groups, or
businesses. If we don’t have programs
to subsidize cellists or the makers of
argyle socks, it’s not because the
public thinks they would be wrong,
destructive, or immoral. We just haven’t
gotten around to them yet.
By James Payne
how America drifted fromWelfare to
“Entitlement”
5
Visit Insideronline.org
How did America become a subsidy-loving
nation? The conversion was accomplished with
semantics. Politicians took to heart the recog-
nition of French philosopher Gustave Le Bon,
who said, “In politics things are less important
than their names. To disguise even the most
absurd ideas with well-chosen words often is
enough to gain their acceptance.” The result
is the sweeping system of
welfare-not-called-welfare
that Americans now see all
around them.
From WeLFare to
entitLement
The grandfather of
today’s semantic confusion
was Franklin Roosevelt, and
the textbook example of his
craft was the Social Security
program adopted in 1935. Roosevelt’s idea was
to force the entire country—poor, middle class,
and wealthy—into a comprehensive national
pension system. His reasoning, cynical yet
accurate, was that once everybody depended
on these government transfers, there would be
no going back. This tactic, as he famously said,
guaranteed that “no damn politician can ever
scrap my Social Security system.”
When a national, tax-funded pension sys-
tem was proposed in the 1920s, it was rejected
as “un-American and socialisti