Free Grownups Versus Needy Dependents

The state has always expanded by promising security and fostering dependency.

Greetings from Austria, home of the Austrian School of Economics, where I celebrated U.S. Independence Day by having dinner with some old ex-pat American friends. Among other things, we discussed how the U.S. government seems determined to continue its upward trajectory of:

1. Expansion

2. Spending ever more money

3. Continuing its self-appointed role as the militarized policeman who gets rid of all the bad guys in the world

As the Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek pointed out, unless strict limits are placed on the state, it will inexorably expand its role in all human affairs with the proposition that the state is necessary for protecting us from bad guys, regulating our affairs to keep us out of trouble, and taking care of us because we (and our market) are incapable of taking care of ourselves.

Thus, the state becomes analogous to what Freudian psychologists characterized as the “devouring mother”—that is, a mother who, by fulfilling all the child’s needs while also being possessive and controlling—hinders the child from becoming an independent adult.

The child of the devouring mother often behaves in a spoiled and conceited way as he cannot come to terms with the reality that the world refuses to cater to his wishes and conform to his notions of the way the world should be.

In a recent Tucker Carlson interview, Senator Ron Johnson expressed his fear that over 50% of the American people are now dependent on the state. This is the outcome of a state that fosters dependency and never celebrates the strong and independent citizen who is capable of taking care of himself and his family.

Thus we have seen how, for decades, the state—and especially the Democrat Party—has fostered the growth of “Victimhood Culture,” which comports perfectly with the promise to take care of those who purportedly cannot take care of themselves because they were victimized by some cohort of white, property-owning men in the past.

Disbursing ever larger sums of money—produced by the state out of thin air—gives the people the illusion that the state is akin to a generous father. What many people who receive these funds fail to realize is that the inflation produced by this arrangement undermines the real purchasing power of the funds they receive.

If the United States is going to remain the “Land of the Free” celebrated in our patriotic hymns, it needs to start celebrating and encouraging free and responsible grownups and disapproving of needy children.