Texas Gov. Rick Perry caused a firestorm among big government types during the Republican presidential primaries last year when he called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. He was right. It was a scam from its inception, and it’s a scam still today. When Social Security was established in 1935, it was intended to be minimal financial assistance to those too old to work. It was also intended to cause voters to become dependent on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democrats. FDR copied the idea from a system established in Italy by Mussolini. The plan was to have folks make small contributions to a fund that would be held in trust for them by the government. At the time, the average life expectancy of Americans was 61 years of age, but Social Security didn’t kick in until age 65; thus, the system was geared to take money from the average American that he would never see.
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Over time, life expectancy increased, the trust fund was raided and spent, and the system was paying out more money than it was taking in. FDR called Social Security an insurance policy. In reality, it is forced savings. However, the custodian of the funds–the Congress–has stolen the savings. The money was stolen by inflation and by outright theft. Today, the best one can hope to receive from Social Security is seventy-five cents for every dollar contributed. That makes Social Security worse than a Ponzi scheme. You can get out of a Ponzi investment. You can’t get out of Social Security. Who would stay with a bank that returned only 75 percent of one’s savings?
The Constitution doesn’t permit the feds to steal your money. But steal, the feds do.
At one of last year’s Republican debates, a young man asked the moderator to pose the following question to the candidates: “If I earn a dollar, how much of it am I entitled to keep?” The question was passed to one of the candidates, who punted. My answer to the young man’s question is: “All of it.”
Every official government pronouncement–from the Declaration of Independence to the U.S. Constitution to the oaths that everyone who works for the government takes–indicates that the government exists to work for us. The Declaration proclaims that the government receives its all of its powers from the consent of the governed. If you believe all this, as I do, then just as we don’t have the power to take our neighbor’s property and distribute it against his will, we lack the ability to give that power to the government. Stated differently, just as you lack the moral and legal ability to take my property, you cannot authorize the government to do so.
Here’s an example you’ve heard before. You’re sitting at home at night and there’s a knock at the door. You open the door, and a guy with a gun pointed at you says: “Give me your money; I want to give it away to the less fortunate.” You think he’s dangerous and crazy, so you call the police. Then you find out he is the police, there to collect your taxes.
The Framers of the Constitution understood this. For 150 years, the federal government was run by user fees, sales of government land and assessments to the states for services rendered. This followed the Jeffersonian first principle that the only moral commercial exchanges are those that are fully voluntary. This worked until the Progressives took over the government in the first decade of the 20th century. They persuaded enough Americans to cause their state legislatures to ratify the Sixteenth Amendment, which was designed to tax the rich and redistribute wealth. Yet, the imposition of a federal income tax is more than just taking from those who work and earn and giving to those who don’t. It is more than just a spigot to fill the federal trough. At its base is a terrifying presumption. It presumes that we don’t really own our property. It accepts the Marxist notion that the state owns all the property and permits us to use whatever it needs us to have so we won’t riot in the streets. Then it steals whatever it politically can get away with.
There are only three ways to wealth in a free society. The inheritance model occurs when someone dies and leaves you wealth. The economic model occurs when you trade a skill, a talent, knowledge, sweat, energy, or creativity to a willing buyer. And the Mafia model occurs when a guy with a gun says: “Give me your money or else.”
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. He is author of “The Freedom Answer Book: How the Government Is Taking Away Your Constitutional Freedoms” (Thomas Nelson, 2013)