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When The Middle Class Goes On Welfare

By Pat Pending

By now, we understand pretty well how being on welfare or on the dole harms poor people.  It tends to push fathers out of the home, leaving children to be raised in poverty by their mothers.  It creates dependence and discourages people from striving to improve their lives.  It starves out real charity, preventing helpful people from becoming personally involved in making a difference in the lives of those in need.  Instead of creating a cooperative atmosphere, with a sense of generosity on the part of the donor and a sense of appreciation on the part of the recipient, it creates a contentious atmosphere, with a sense of resentment on the part of the person from whom resources are forcibly taken and a sense of entitlement and victimhood on the part of the recipient.  While we may be willing to tolerate some government payments to needy people, most of us wish we could come up with a better way of improving people’s lives.  But if we find welfare for poor people to be so distasteful and so harmful, we really ought to think about the even more disastrous results of putting massive numbers of middle class people on the dole!

Of course, there is no program called “middle class welfare” or “middle class dole”, but these programs certainly do exist under different names.  For example, we have farm subsidies that force taxpayers to pay farmers not to farm.  We have import duties to protect certain domestic products from competition, which is a form of dole for U.S. farmers and manufacturers, causing U.S. consumers to pay higher prices than they would in a competitive environment.  We have government schools, which force taxpayers to pay for children to be educated in accordance with the desires of the politically powerful.  We have Social Security, which requires today’s young, struggling workers to support middle class and wealthy retirees, and we have Medicare, which also forces current workers to support retirees.  So, there are plenty of welfare programs for middle class Americans.  The funny part is that these programs are also funded primarily by middle class Americans!

Many middle class people are happy to jump on the welfare train, feeling relieved to push responsibility for their own lives onto someone else, or thinking that they are getting something for nothing.  But what they are really doing is converting themselves from free people to slaves.  Instead of being able to make choices about their own lives, middle class people are now dependent upon those who have taken control.  We have lost the freedom to use our own funds to educate our own children as we think best and are instead reduced to arguing about whether or not the ten commandments will be posted in the schools we are forced to support.  We have lost 15% of our income for our entire working lives that could have been invested for retirement and are instead hoping that the next generation will take care of us in our old age.  We have lost the doctor-patient relationship and now have a massive government-controlled insurance wedged between doctors and patients, deciding the treatments and medicines we will be able to receive.  The fact that we get to vote for our masters does not mean that we are free.

So, now that we recognize the error of our ways and the tremendous cost of getting on the welfare train, isn’t it time for us middle class folks to get off the dole and get our freedom back?

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