The Confessions of a Food Stamp Reciptient

This morning while having breakfast, I realized just where the Political Left in this country made their big mistake. I had just opened up the first package of name brand sausage that I have purchased in years, and fried up a patty to perfection. Then I placed it on my plate with over-medium eggs and fluffy white grits. Upon tasting the sausage, I was overwhelmed with the great favor.

You see, for years I have been buying mostly store brand generic foods, and buying as little meat as possible, due to its relatively high prices. But, all that changed earlier this week. My wife and I suddenly found ourselves with approximately $800.00 to spend on groceries for the remainder of the month. Therefore, we decided to splurge a little. While we did stick mostly to staples, took advantage of two-for-one deals, and chose many store brands, we also bought a thick cut New York Strip steak for us to share and a package of Jimmy Dean Sausage just for me. (My wife does not like whole hog pork patty sausage.) Well, last night's dinner was an out of this world melt in your mouth experience, and my breakfast this morning was incredible.

Like many of my fellow citizens this year, just three months earlier, I lost my job, and my wife had to go back to waiting tables (funny, spell check doesn't recognize "waitressing"; it comes up as wait person, even though you can't say, "she went back to wait personning.") This change in employment status raised our family of four's eligibility for food stamps from $150.00 a month to $500.00 a month. Yet, due to bureaucratic red tape, they dropped us from enrollment the previous month. Consequently, last month was pretty Spartan in our kitchen. When they reinstated us, they credited our EBT card retroactively for $300.00 for last month and $500.00 for this month, giving us the undreamed of $800.00 to spend.

While I was standing there savoring the noticeable difference between brand name breakfast sausage, and store brand, it hit me. The leftist plot to over-throw the country is doomed to back fire. Their recently revealed conspiracy was for community activist to push the citizenry to demand ever increasing government provided social services, welfare programs, until the federal budget became so overburdened, that it would eventually collapse. The theory goes on to presuppose that once the federal government went bust, the citizenry would rise up and demand an all-powerful socialist state. Well no one ever said these leftist activists were top-notch macro-economists, because the theory is rife with misconceptions.

After three years of a down economy, three years of a Democrat Congress, and one year of the Obama administration, things have gotten about as bad as they can be. Yet, the voices calling for bigger government have diminished, and a stronger call for a return to smaller government and more self-reliance is on the upswing. The truth is, once enough people have lost their jobs, they stop complaining that when they had work, someone else was making more than they were, and start yearning for the days when they actually had a job, and did not have to depend on food stamps to feed their family. If a large-scale economic collapse should come, the government would be unable to rebuild our immense national economy. It is broke and its clout is shot. The People understand that they on their own, to build back the economy. It will be rebuilt organically, from the ground up, just as it was originally. Only the "Invisible Hand" can envision, and best utilize, the talents, needs, and desires of each, and every, individual in the nation. The People are seeing that no army of bureaucrats in a command economy could ever do that as efficiently as a Free Market economy without further trampling on their freedom.

So, what about my pork sausage? Well, as long as the government is going to put premium sausage and prime cut steak on my table, I have less incentive to go out get a job. Doing so, would not only reduce my burden on the federal budget, but would also start adding money back into the government coffers from my income taxes. If I do not feel the need to go out and create wealth (for society and myself) then multiply this effect. Others will not be motivated either. The net effect of government welfare is a snowballing desire to not work and enjoy the benefits of the welfare state. This one aspect of the leftist plot is correct, in that once you start the welfare plan in motion its builds a momentum of its own. However, it is the final out come that they got wrong. Even with the promise of steak, I know that the gravy train cannot last forever. With everybody dependent on the government, who is going to produce the wealth needed to fund the government. If you need a clue about a centralized government's ability to run an economy, just look at the standard of living, and the lack of, and poor quality of the consumer goods in the ex-soviet union and in pre-tourist Cuba. With so much money going out and so little coming in, there will eventually be no wealth available to fund the new socialist state that is supposed to replace our present system. This is the state of affairs we find ourselves in today.

Now, the shortsighted will say, that it was the "excesses" of the free market economy that led us to the present economic downturn, and the precarious situation, we now find ourselves. However, this idea ignores two obvious facts. First, our present system is not a pure Free Market, "laissez-faire" economy. The government leaches unprecedented amounts of wealth out of the economy to waste on the very social welfare programs that disincentivize people to work, and robs businesses of the wealth they need for reinvestment in infrastructure, adaptation to new markets, and research and development. In reality, it was the over-sized burden of government that pulled down our economy in the first place. The fact is, the government was, and is, intrinsically involved in interfering with every aspect of the private sector. Therefore, there is no way you can blame pure Capitalism for our recent economic decline. Now, some may say that was the purpose of the Democrat Party's Stimulus Bill, to reinvest in our industries, to strengthen them, and to rebuild for the future. However, this is both theoretical and factually wrong.

Theoretically wrong, because governments cannot plan economies anywhere near as well as the Free Market. Just look at Communist China's "Big Push" type twenty-year economic plans. They were all disastrous. A new study reveals that it takes the private sector $31,000.00 to create a new job that would last a least 6 years, or more; whereas, it took the Stimulus Bill approximately $91,000.00 to "create or save" a government job for just this year. Moreover, the idea is factually wrong, because the Stimulus Bill mostly sent money to government programs and employees; and as a result, instead of trimming the burden of government, it actually heaped more straw upon the camels back.

The second ignored fact is the existence of the well documented, and predictable, long wave "boom and bust" economic cycles. They are as inevitable and natural as waves on the ocean. It would prove just as difficult to eliminate economic cycles, as it would be foolish to try to smooth out waves on the ocean. Economists have long known about these business cycles. It is only the general population that remains short sighted enough to think that an economic expansion will, and should, last indefinitely.

I put forward that it was today's political Left, the Left that supported Obama, that most expected, and most wished, that the last recently growing economy would last forever. That way, they had only to vastly redistribute this wealth to attain the utopia they envisioned. Yet, once the economy collapsed, this idea proved to everyone, to be misguided and futile. For only a robust economy can create the wealth that a liberal, large government, welfare state needs to siphon off, for its own purposes. In the final analysis, neither liberal, nor leftist schools of thought can survive the test of time or rational thought.