Frédéric Bastiat called it “spoliation”; California’s Democratic politicians call it social justice.
A bill went into effect last week, offering complete medical coverage to an estimated 700,000 undocumented — illegal — immigrants. The price tag? 3.1 billion dollars.
Well, not “price tag”: call it a subsidy tag.
California taxpayers will pay for it. Or perhaps U.S. taxpayers will end up with the bill, as Dagen McDowell insisted on Fox News, prophesying that the program “will turn into a national issue” that will, inevitably, “swamp the federal budget.”
Ms. McDowell also noted that the state’s targeted sugar daddies, the wealthy, “are going to other states, so much that they’ve lost a congressional seat,” all of which must lead to insolvency.
Indeed, the state is running far into the red — the color of the ink on budget columns, not voting columns. The state faces not merely annual deficits and a huge debt, there is also this looming trillion-dollar debt implied by the unfunded liabilities of the state employee pensions.
There is an old pattern here, which is why I brought up an old author in the first sentence.
First we subsidize the poor. Then we extend the subsidies up the income ladder. Now we give huge subsidies to those who enter the country illegally.
It’s as if Californians have forgotten the nature of income redistribution: you have to have income to redistribute. At some point the wealth being taken from the productive vanishes, as society becomes unproductive and descends into ruin.
There are two meanings of Bastiat’s “spoliation”:
noun
1 the action of ruining or destroying something.
2 the action of taking goods or property from somewhere by illegal or unethical means.
The two are linked.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “The S‑Word in California”
The opportunity cost of not feeding the hungry at our door is that we are not a Christian nation. I would suggest that folks stop saying they want a Christian Nation if they don’t want tax dollars going to the hungry, the naked, the unhoused and the sick. What kind of country are we that watches dirty naked starving people and just says, can’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. A stingy country. I think the reason California chooses to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, care for the sick and to be good stewards of the Earth is because every great wisdom tradition teaches that.
Milton Freedman warned that you can have a welfare state and you can have open borders, but not simultaneously.
California is part of a process, and its progressive leadership fully understands that California cannot afford what it has obligated itself to provide. It is intentionally aiming toward bankruptcy, and anticipates an eventual bailout by the federal government which will act to spread its policies to the other states, and in particular the complete socialization of medical services throughout the country.
This is not foolishness and is not short-sighted, it is an additional step and progress toward the goal of the progressives which they do not believe they can accomplish via the legislative process. They intend to create a single payer, and eventually provider, nationalized health care scheme by expanding Medicaid to effectively everyone who cannot be expected to pay. By that they will then motivate those who are paying the taxes to impose the system upon themselves with their jealousy and upset regarding of those who are “getting it” free. That will end any semblance of a market based medical services sector.
Collapse and being bailed out by the federal government may be what is being sought. Because bankrupting the state and leaving bills and obligations unpaid seems just too crazy to be an actual goal. But the folks doing the spending never seem to pay any consequences, so maybe the madness is merely self-serving.
Resources change hands one of three ways:
[1] voluntarily:
[1a] by unconditioned transfer — call it ‘love’
[1b] by conditioned exchange — call it ‘trade’
[2] involuntarily — call it ‘theft’
The political left repeatedly wants to pretend that [2] ‘theft’ is [1a] ‘love’, and that [1b] ‘trade’ is [2] ‘theft’.
Time and time again, the point has been made that Christianity tells its adherents things about what to do with their own resources, which is rather different from telling them to seize the resources of other people. Indeed, liberals — real liberals, not the “progressives” and socialists who stole the name “liberal” — often advocate genuine and generous charity. But they object to seizing the resources of other people and pretending that spending those resources could possibly be charitable.
Meanwhile, guys like you pretend that theft is Christian love; but, when some conservative hauls-out a Bible or the writings of the Church Fathers in an attempt to justify an intrusion that you don’t like, you will mysteriously rediscover a right to be free from the prescriptions of other folks’ religions.