State Welfare: The Opiate of the Masses

I.

There appears to be a progressive transformation in the values of individuals from an entrepreneurial attitude to an entitlement mindset. Why has this philosophy of statism become the predominant attitude of individuals in a society? The transformation is encouraged by the State to reinforce its legitimacy and cement the dependency of the population upon continuing governmental action.

Continuing State action has an opiate effect upon individuals, and the chief drug of interventionism is government-provided welfare. My thesis is that welfare is a social narcotic that the State uses to secure the support and voting allegiance of citizens.

State welfare includes, but is not limited to: social welfare programs (e.g. the dole, paid parental leave, baby bonus, public healthcare, public education), corporate welfare schemes (e.g. financial bailouts, subsidies, tariffs, public-private partnerships) and the military industrial complex (e.g. bullets, bombs and nation building). The 'opiate effect' of state welfare is a conflict of interest that arises when the recipients of welfare are among the voting population. This effect is not limited to democratic systems of government, but for simplicity's sake I will confine my argument to Western democracies.

If a subset of the population is receiving money as a result of a welfare program, there is a natural incentive for these individuals to vote for these programs to continue. This effect can become more deeply rooted when the benefit of a welfare program justifies the existence of jobs, professions and entire industries that would not otherwise exist in the free market. In this case, large segments of the population can become financially dependent on the continuity and growth of these welfare programs.

It is this insidious effect of welfare that can be likened to a narcotic. Individuals very easily can become addicts to ‘free’ handouts by the government to support their interests. The price of this addiction is intellectual and voting allegiance to the chief drug-pusher: the government. The allegiance of welfare-addicted individuals ensures the continuation of the coercive seizure of private property from individuals via the State. Thus the State can make it politically expedient for greater intervention into the economy and the liberties of individuals.

II.

A closer examination reveals that State welfare is an umbrella classification for governmental action that aggressively transfers wealth from one group of individuals to another. Without the aggressive wealth transfer process, State welfare could not be sustained. State welfare contrasts sharply with the free market process of peaceful wealth transfer. The free market involves either the voluntary gift or exchange of private property between individuals – a peaceful and non-violent act. But state welfare requires the coercive appropriation of private property from individuals and the transfer of these goods to politically selected individuals.

Pro-state interventionists claim that the property appropriated by the State from individuals is not private and state action is not coercive, because it has been democratically decided.

Let us firstly examine the most common form of aggressive appropriation of private property: the income tax. The income tax is a claim by the State on a portion of an individual's property, in this case his wage. The percentage of a wage that can be claimed as a tax by the State is set by decree. It is fundamentally immaterial whether this decree is made arbitrarily by a dictator or oligarchy or by a democratic referendum. The end result is the same - the appropriation of private property by coercion. The critical error of the pro-interventionists is that democracy is self-evidently virtuous.

The State's claim on an individual's wage is largely a claim on an individual's labor. To receive a wage in the first place, an individual exchanged their labor to an employer for a wage. The employer gains the time of an employee to exercise their knowledge, skills and/or brute force for a given end, and in exchange, the employee receives money. The State, through the income tax, claims the exchange value of an individual's voluntary submission of time to an employee. Thus the State's claim on an individual's wage is a claim on their time.

If the State sets an income tax of 10%, then 10% of an individual's working time is devoted to the State, not the employer. The individual may work 100% of their working time, but is only rewarded for 90% of this time. In essence, the individual has laboured 10% of their time to earning money for the State and not for themselves. If the income tax is 50%, then half of the working time of an individual is devoted to earning money for the State rather than themselves. Of course when 100% of an individuals labor is directed to generating wealth for another individual or group, that labor is not considered employment, but slavery.

Is it any less slavery if the percentage of the slave's wages is less than 100%? To answer this question, we must first ask - what is the basis of slavery's immorality? Was slavery's injustice fundamentally because race was the classifying factor for enslaving individuals? The answer is no: race wasn't the fundamental injustice of slavery. The injustice of slavery - aside from the proximal injustices of racial discrimination and an inhumane seizure and treatment of human beings - was the appropriation of the slave's labor.

Similarly, if a slave had freedom of speech, religion, assembly and movement, would slavery cease to be unjust? No. More specifically, even if a slave had a freedom to choose their occupation (e.g. carpenter, engineer, doctor, musician), but the slave-owner was the recipient of 100% of the slave's 'wage', would slavery be acceptable? The answer again is of course not, because slavery is not fundamentally defined by a lack of choice but rather the ownership of an individual’s time. Does the injustice of slavery diminish proportionally with a reduction in the percentage of the wage retained by the slave-owner? Again no, because slavery is not defined by the percentage of labor appropriated by the slave owner.

Slavery is the claim of ownership upon an individual's labor - the scale of the claim is immaterial. Is there a fundamental difference between a single slave-owner or the State? The State does not typically make a claim on the outright ownership of individuals (at least in Western democracies) so in this respect there is a cosmetic difference. There is however, no principal difference between the State and slave-owner when it comes to the action of appropriating the property of individuals.

Indeed a claim by the State upon an individual's wage, at any percentage, is a claim on 100% of their wage. If it is legitimate to claim 2%, 20%, 50% or 70%, then it is equally legitimate for the State to claim 100% of an individual's wage. In other words, the existence of any income tax establishes the legitimacy for the State to claim the entire wage of an individual at any time. This capacity of the State, through force of law, to claim the entire productivity of an individual is principally equivalent to the power a slave-owner has over a slave. This similarity even extends to the threat of physical force upon a resistant individual.

Therefore when the State claims the time, labor and productivity of an individual - at any scalable percentage - the State takes the role of 'Slave-owner-in-Chief'. The servile nature of the individual to the State is not an esoteric abstraction. The philosophical underpinning of State action must be revealed if we are to make informed choices.

III.

One of the central criticisms of the above view is that the private property appropriated by the State is not private. In the context of the income tax, whatever proportion of an individual's wage that the State claims, legitimately belongs to it not the individual. The State's claim on an individual wage is equivalent to classifying this property as a public good. It is argued that a public good is the property of the general public but it is under the management of representatives of the public - the government. As Murray Rothbard might have put it: “…the only thing you can know for sure about a public good is that it doesn't belong to you.”

As demonstrated above, the power to claim a percentage of an individual's wage is the power to claim the entire wage of an individual at any time. It follows that if the taxable income of an individual is a public good then their entire wage is a public good. Thus the State alone determines what portion of an individual's income is relinquished to become private property. As a result, the public good argument eliminates the true existence of private property, as the State may be called upon to appropriate 'their' property prospectively or retrospectively. If the State can intervene to seize property that is contractually bound to an individual, before and after they have physically received it, can it really be said that an individual truly owns anything? Through the glasses of the public goods argument, the answer is 'no'.

Some may contend that as a nation of laws, under a democratic or republican system of government, the legal permission to tax is given to the government. This is to say that an individual has consented to taxation by participating in society and making use of government services – via the "social contract". Thus any objection to taxation on the grounds of theft by the State is erroneous, as the individual has already consented to State action.

Social contract theory makes the following claims: (1) individuals have consented to a voluntary social contract with the State; (2) in return, individuals receive benefits from the government like roads, bridges, hospitals, education, healthcare etc; (3) the individual agrees to pay taxes to fund these services; (4) because the State provides the aforementioned benefits, individuals have a moral obligation to pay taxes and thus fulfil their duty to the social contract and (5) any individual who does not wish to participate in the social contract is ‘free’ to leave the geographic influence of the State.

The only other contract comparable to the social contract is a marriage contract. With a marriage contract, both parties agree to share their property and pledge fidelity to each other regardless of circumstance. In most marriage contracts there is a proposal that must be mutually agreed to, a cooling-off period (engagement), a ceremony where the conditions of the contract are read out in the presence of witness, pledges are made by both parties to honour the conditions of the contract and rings are exchanged as a physical reminder of the contract at all times.

The social contract is the equivalent of an arranged marriage. The individual was betrothed to be married to the State the moment they were born. There was no proposal; because there was no proposal there was no cooling-off period; the marriage contract was never agreed upon between the individual and the State, much less codified. Indeed, there is nothing about the social contract that can be considered a contract at all, because the fundamental element of a contract is voluntary consent.

Consent cannot be claimed if an individual remains in the geographical jurisdiction of the State, makes use of State services and participates in elections. To demonstrate this, imagine that there is a man called Brad who one day sees this beautiful woman, Angelina. The problem with Brad is that despite being a generous and wealthy man, he's quite shy. To reach out to Angelina, Brad starts to pay all of Angelina's expenses without her knowledge: rent, car, water, electricity and even hires the best private security guards to escort and protect her home 24/7. Angelina doesn't know quite what to make of it and despite trying to pay for these expenses on her own, everything is paid off before she has a chance to do so. One day Brad summons the courage to finally meet Angelina. 

He knocks on her door, reveals himself to be the source of generosity and professes his undying love to Angelina. Angelina doesn't know what to say. But before she can say anything, things take a turn for the weird. Brad tells her that from this moment on, they are married. Angelina, understandably enraged, protests that she never agreed to get married to Brad. Brad responds that she doesn't need to agree formally to be married to him. Moreover, Brad explains that since he has been paying all of her bills and protection, she has a moral obligation to marry Brad! The fact that she had accepted his generosity in the first place means that Angelina implicitly agreed to marry Brad. Angelina yells at Brad to leave her alone, to stop his 'generosity' towards her and get out of her house. Brad firmly tells Angelina that if she doesn't comply with her side of this social contract, the security assigned to protect her would hold her prisoner until she did. Alternatively, Brad tells Angelina that she's free to leave the geographic area if she wants to divorce herself from the contract with Brad.

The above example fits perfectly within the mould of social contract theory, but of course no one would cite this example as a legitimate marriage or any other kind of contract. Likewise, the social contract doesn’t justify the actions of the State. Social contract advocates stand on the implicit consent argument that claims that because an individual was born in the State's geographic jurisdiction, they have eternally consented to all of the State’s appropriations of their future property and all of the State’s action on their person (remembering that the social contract can and has been used to justify military conscription).

Here we must emphasise that the State itself is not a supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient, sinless and immaculately conceived entity. Rather it is a relatively small group of individuals that are subject to the same lust for power, immorality and evil as normal individuals. Therefore the argument that individuals have consented by birth to any appropriation of private property to a small group of individuals, called the State, appears to be the argument of a corrupt system committed to the perpetual enslavement of an unwitting population. Moreover, as the government writes the laws legitimising their actions upon individuals, one cannot count on the law for protection against their immoral actions.

IV.

In light of all of these considerations, what is the likelihood that individuals dependent on State welfare will cease to politically support State interventionism? Unfortunately the likelihood is very low, as it seems that almost anyone can be bought. For some the price is thirty pieces of silver, a stable paycheque, job security or free public transport. Despite the fact that in many Western democracies less that 50% of the population pays income tax and it is their wealth bankrolling State welfare programs, the political will to change this state of affairs will simply not materialise.

The addiction to State welfare is too deep among an ever-increasing proportion of the population. Once the majority has become almost entirely financially dependent on the continued plundering of a minority’s private property, it is almost impossible to roll it back. While eventually State welfare will collapse for economic reasons, what hope do we have in the meantime? I believe breaking free of the intellectual shackles of statism is the first crucial step.