Owned by the government

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 10, 2003]

Most people who have money usually got it by providing other people with something they wanted badly enough to pay for it. This is never called "public service" by the politically correct. Selling people what they want, in order to get what you want, is called "greed." It's public service when you decide what other people "really" need and impose it at the taxpayers' expense. It's public service when you create hoops for other people to jump through -- rules to follow, forms to fill out, lives to be lived as you prescribe -- all for their own good.

Given this mindset, you can see why letting people keep more of the money they earned is considered to be indulging them with benefits that the government "showers" on them. It is like subsidizing sin. Anyone who has read "The Federalist Papers" -- or who has read between the lines in the Constitution -- knows that the people who founded this country had a great fear of government's power over individuals. They knew that there are always busybodies who cannot be happy unless they are telling other people what to do and forcing them to do it.

Property rights were put into the Constitution to keep politicians on a short leash, instead of letting them roam at will over the land and treat the wealth created by others as something for them to dispense as largess and use to buy votes. People had the right to bear arms, so that they could defend themselves, instead of letting their safety and the safety of their families be yet another playground for bright ideas about crime and criminals.

When you add up all the requirements, restrictions, re-education, and ridiculous ideas dreamed by all the 57 varieties of busybodies, you end up hemmed in like a rat backed into a corner. Literally from the moment you wake up in the morning and take a shower (with a government-prescribed rate of water flow) to the time you flush the toilet (also with a government-prescribed water flow rate) for the last time before going to bed, your life has been laid out for you.

Incidentally, the government also subsidizes water for farmers from federal irrigation projects, so that farms end up wasting far more water growing things like rice in the California desert, when the same rice can be grown in parts of the country where ample water is provided free of charge from the clouds. But consistency is not the bottom line. The bottom line is having you and the farmers both being directed by the anointed. To people with this mindset, the government all but owns us.

-- Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is the author of many books, including Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic Books).

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