Big government is now the ‘opiate of the people'

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.” — Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative.

As we write this column the federal government is facing default on its $31+ trillion in national debt effective June 5th, 2023.

It took America 211 years to accrue $5 trillion of debt and only 23 years to tack on an additional $26 trillion.

Former congressman Dave Brat, who has a Ph.D. in economics, wrote,

“We’re on the verge of having $50 trillion dollars in debt to hand off to the kids in 10 years…The American consumer right now is $17 trillion in debt. Consumers have $1 trillion in credit card debt, $1.5 trillion in college loan debt. We’re in debt up to our eyeballs. And we’ve got a recession coming up, another financial crisis caused by the Federal Reserve for their mismanagement…[They’re] in a tough bind [because] they basically want inflation, so they can pay the debt back with cheaper dollars. And so that’s where we stand.”

With an interest rate of 5%, taxpayers are looking at $2.5 trillion a year just in interest payments. That is three times the current total U.S. military budget.

Big Government — “The Opiate of the People”

According to USGovernmentSpending.com, “In FY 2022 total US government spending on welfare — federal, state, and local — was “guesstimated” to be $1,682 billion, including $867 billion for Medicaid, and $815 billion in other welfare.” As of June 2022, the number of people on welfare in the United States stood at 65.7 million.

In 2021, around 18.28 million people were working for state and local governments in the United States, which is much higher than the number of federal government (civilian) employees, which stood at about 2.85 million people in that year. Of this number, approximately 16 million are employed in state and local governments. The federal government numbers include active duty military personnel and U.S. Postal Service workers. The federal government is the nation’s single largest employer, but it employs only about 12% of all government employees, compared to 24% at the state level and 63% at the local level. In March 2019, state and local governments employed 19.7 million people, an increase of 0.4% from the 2018 total.

Big government has now become the “opiate of the people” because people keeping electing politicians who can’t stop spending beyond we the people’s means to pay back the ever growing national debt, let alone our own personal debt.

Unlike Senator Goldwater, today’s politicians promote welfare for U.S. citizens and illegal aliens alike. These politicians from the school house to the White House continue to pass laws that take away individual freedoms. Today, the U.S. Constitution is ignored in favor of new programs, policies and endless wars that have cost American taxpayers billions and billions and billions of dollars.

David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years wrote,

“If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

Brat told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, it’s important to understand one thing: “It’s impossible to default. We have way more money [available]. A default means you default on the U.S. Treasury Bond. If we ever defaulted on the U.S. Treasury, we’d all be fishing under a bridge with Frodo. It would be the end of Western civilization.”

Politicians have now put we the people in an untenable position. Elected officials from the school house to the White House have put us at a point that if we default on our national, local, and state debts, then we have defaulted the city, county, state and U.S. treasuries and that, perhaps, would be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

The question is has this been the plan all along? Have these politicians sold we the people’s freedoms and liberties for 30 pieces of silver?

Are we now being crucified because we stand up and say we want less government, less spending and more liberty?

Just ask those who have been imprisoned since January 20th, 2021. They know the answer.

Dave Ramsey wrote, “You must gain control over your money or the lack of it will forever control you.”

It’s past time to take our money back from big government and use that money to pursue our own and our family’s happiness.

This is why the 2024 presidential election has so much importance.

We the people must elect politicians who:

Have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient.
And, who are fully dedicated to reducing the size of government at every level.

Not to do so makes us slaves and not free men and women.

Remember, as finance expert Nathan W. Morris wrote, “Every time you borrow money, you’re robbing your future self.”

SOURCES:

The Source Of The Marxist Takeover Of American Institutions Is So Obvious It Hurts

Republicans’ Common-Sense Demands Are Winning The Debt Ceiling Debate

Econ Expert on the GOP’s Debt Ceiling Hand: ‘We’re Holding Four Aces’

U.S. National Debt Clock

Rep. Andy Biggs: The Media’s Reporting on the Debt Ceiling Deal is Misleading- Here’s the Truth

Erase the Past, Control the Future