I find it very interesting to read the views of people from many years ago about the dangers of certain types of government action and seeing how those dangers are coming to pass now, or have already come to pass.

Ayn Rand is a great source of this type of thing and I am finding Andrew Mellon is as well.  In his Taxation: The People’s Business, written in 1924, he pointed out the dangers of the government subsidizing business or giving bonuses to certain classes of consumers.

A bonus or subsidy can be paid only by taking money out of the pockets of all the people in order that it shall find its way back into the pockets of some of the people.  It accomplishes nothing less than a redistribution of the wealth of the country by governmental operation, and constitutes a bad precedent, which is likely to prove more and more expensive to the country with each surrender to organized pressure.

We see this danger coming to full flower today.  Step by step, each building on the one before, these programs have grown and grown until today more than 50% of the current government budget is made up of such programs.  It is even higher when you consider that many other subsidies are “hidden” in programs of the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Defense and more.

When you consider the future deficits in these programs, promised payouts compared to expected revenue, our government budget is spiraling out of control, heading for disaster.