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Socialism's Greatest Lie: Government Can Give You Everything for
Free

Posted: 03 Jan 2010 09:50 PM PST

Socialism's greatest lie is that it promises the people
something for nothing, services and programs of all kind that will either
be "free" or more affordable than the free market variety. But just like
the ads promising you a free iPod or a chance to make millions from home
while you yawn, socialism is not something for nothing, instead more often
it's nothing for something.

The idea that the government will take care of you is
appealing, entire nanny states have been built on that proposition. But
the government can't take care of you, it can't even pay its own bills
without you. It can't run a television station, a toll bridge or even an
off track betting service, or any venture that in private hands would be
profitable, without using taxpayer funds to prop it up.

A
legitimate enterprise never needs to fool its customers into thinking that
they will receive something for nothing. It is only the scammers that need
to do that. What a promise of something for nothing really indicates is a
venture that is run by people who are incapable of hard work, who get by
on tricking others out of their hard earned money. And that in short is
what socialism looks like, with its monolithic bureaucracies where
incompetence is the order of the day, its offices upon offices that never
need to produce their results or show their books, and its embedded
corruption that insures the money never goes where you think it
does.

The promise of free health care though is far more devilish
than a free iPod, because it doesn't simply promise people a gadget, but
promises that the government will keep them alive. And because government
free offers not only tend to cost a lot, but have a way of being universal
and with no opt-out clause available, they're a scam in which
participation is not optional to individual foolishness, but mandatory to
everyone.

Free or cheap health care of course is appealing, but
there is no such thing as "free" or "cheap" because everything the
government does is paid for twice over. Everything you get from the
government you pay for, either directly through taxes and fees, or
indirectly through rising costs and black market prices. Taxes of course
are the most obvious way in which you wind up paying more for the same
services that the government provides you with.

Taxes are a fool's
credit card, in which he spends and spends without thinking about the
cost, until suddenly the bill comes due, and he simultaneously agonizes
over the cost without connecting it to all the spending. Those who
supported Obama and his proposals, without realizing their cost while
complaining about their taxes are paying with a fool's credit card at the
ballot box, incapable of even understanding what the bill means when it
comes due.

But politicians are generally smart enough to assure
voters that they won't be paying for the program directly. No, they assure
us, the rich will pay for it. Big business will pay for it. Or we'll just
borrow more money instead of raising taxes. If the regular fool's credit
card is Visa, this indirect form of payment is Washington D.C., Idiot's
American Express card. Because paying indirectly just adds a few layers of
expenses between the taxpayer and the bill.

Raising taxes on big
business and "the rich" is popular, but big business and the upper income
tax bracket will ultimately pass down the cost to consumers in the form of
high prices on goods and services, in the form of job cuts and
outsourcing. Socialism's trickle down poverty approach insures that taxing
the rich will still tax the poor and the lower middle class, it will just
do so indirectly.

Less available products and jobs don't come with
a tax bill. The tax is an invisible one in which depressing business,
trickles down to the lower and middle classes who end up with fewer and
more expensive product and service choices and fewer job opportunities. To
balance this out, governments will begin offering tax breaks to
businesses, and since something has to give, taxpayers end up footing the
bill for business tax breaks impelled by business tax hikes. Governments
find this convenient as the route between the government and program and
higher individual taxes has become too indirect for most people to realize
why their taxes are going up, and because this allows politicians to claim
credit for saving jobs and benefiting from the donations sent their way by
business lobbyists.

It would have been cheaper and simpler for
individual taxpayers to see a direct tax hike, instead of the complicated
way in which the government moves around money, while the politicians
still benefit from covering every angle for a problem that they
created.

And then of course there's the loan package. If you don't
want to raise taxes on anyone, you have to borrow money, which is the
Lunatic's MasterCard, because while taxes remain the same, the amount of
debt being carried rises, and that debt has to be paid off. So instead of
actually paying for a government service through higher taxes, the public
takes on a huge load of debt, whose rising interest rates are far more
expensive than direct taxation would be. But politicians don't care since
they can keep passing the fiscal football until they're out of office. At
which point the next set of politicians look at the debt figures and their
own polls, and keep on doing the same thing, until the entire public has
been reduced to a sharecropper society, working to pay off a debt to
foreign lenders. A debt that they can never pay off because politicians
keep borrowing more money to cover the cost of a constantly expanding
government and a population that keeps consuming more government
services.

But directly or in-directly, in any of these ways, the free or
cheap government program quickly turns out to be mind-blowingly expensive.
And there is a simple reason for that, because while government is
officially non-profit, which seemingly suggests that by cutting out the
profit motive, the government would be able to offer the same services at
lower cost-- the joker in the deck is that government programs are
administered much less efficiently than their free market
equivalents.

While free market companies have to be efficient
because profit motive requires cutting expenses, government programs don't
have to be efficient, they just have to "be". A corporation has to
increase the value provided to its customers and shareholders to remain
competitive. The best way to do that is by cutting expenses. By contrast
government programs don't have to increase the value provided to
customers, as they are non-competitive, and while the public may be
government's unofficial shareholders, the politicians insulated them from
the actual bureaucrats who run the programs. And the bureaucrats are the
"expenses", which allows them to save themselves from ever being
cut.

And where free market businesses may cut staff first and
customers second, health care unions along the lines of SEIU or the
California Nurses Union insure that staff can never be cut without
triggering a shutdown of all health services. By centralizing health
services, health care unions gain a great deal of power that makes them
effectively unstoppable. Jobs are padded and expanded. Unions win
concessions at the expense of the people the government programs are
provided for. That means teacher's unions gain, while schoolchildren lose
out. Nursing unions gain, while patients lose out. In the balance between
a union and a customer, the union always wins because it wields more clout
and brings more money to the table. And that means there is no way to
control staff expenses without a prolonged political
battle.

Furthermore government programs are not actually
non-profit, they just appear that way. A common argument made by
socialized health care advocates is that the public should not be spending
money on health care that will be used to fund some CEO's yacht. But the
thing is that under government health care, the money is still being used
to fund someone's yacht. It might be the yacht of top health care advisers
who pull down six figure salaries, it might be the yacht of allied
non-profit executives who frequently pull down six and seven figure
salaries, it might the yacht of a health care union bigwig, or finally it
might be the yacht of the CEO of a medical contractor who wins the chance
to provide the government with surgical tubing, at twice the cost, thanks
to some help from his buddy, Senator X or Congressman Y, whose campaign
fund he just happened to donate to. But either way there way there's
always a yacht. And you're always paying for it. The difference is that
with the government there are a lot more yachts and you have no way to opt
out of paying for them.

The profit motive in government programs
frequently takes the form of corruption, with no bid contracts and
sweetheart deals, jobs for the sons and daughters of the donors to Senator
X and Congressman Y. Sure the program itself is non-profit, until you look
at how much it cost to build that hospital vs how much it should have
cost. It's non-profit until you look at that nice house that Company Z
helped Senator X pick up in exchange for his off the record chat with the
Chairman of the Department of Y that insured that Company Z got the
contract, and the taxpayers got screwed.

This is not non-profit,
it's a kleptocracy. And a kleptocracy is for profit, the profit is just
under the table. The more government expands, the more the kleptocracy
grows. Naturally the kleptocracy just loves the idea of expanding
government programs. Why shouldn't it? Free market companies make money by
selling products to consumers. The kleptocracy make money by exchanging
government contracts for donations, favors and payoffs. Externally a
kleptocracy may look like it's booming, but in reality it's rotten to the
core, and nothing is done well anymore. Doing anything requires knowing a
friend of a friend in the government. Because the only way to do business
under a kleptocracy is to be part of it. Or be its victim.

The
result of all this is that government services are actually fantastically
more expensive than their free market counterparts, the way you pay for
them however is often indirect, which makes them seem cheap or free. But
like a credit card whose payments don't come due right away, it feels good
to spend the money if you don't realize the connection between the bill
and the money being spent.

Government health care means that you're actually paying twice
for the same program. Once for the cost of the basic resources that make
up the program, and once for all the government inflation of the actual
cost of the program. The government cannot actually cut the basic costs of
of the resources of the program, which may be the staff, the supplies, the
facilities and the administration of the program. Government
administration is more expensive than its free market counterparts.
Government contractors that provide the supplies and facilities are
invariably much more expensive, because of corruption. Government staffing
tends to be a more expensive and lower quality operation dominated by
unions and bureaucracy.

Since the government cannot reduce
the actual base costs of the resources, and in fact inflates them, the
result is a more expensive government program. What it can do however is
hide those costs directly in your taxes, in indirectly someone else's
taxes or in the national debt, which will trickle down to you anyway but
at a higher cost. Essentially this makes socialism into a three monte card
game, in which whatever card you pick, you lose. The only question is how
much you lose.

Nothing from the government is ever free. The only
question is how much you lose.