The Fat Cat Billionaire and the Welfare Queen
Hint: both are red herrings
It goes by many names: “the Uniparty”, “horseshoe theory”, and “the deep state”, to name a few. The idea is that the Republican-Democrat divide is a facade, a way to distract the careless observer with the appearance of conflict. While the masses are distracted by the Kabuki theater “battle” being waged between “the good guys” and “the bad guys”—the exact identity of “good” and “bad” to be determined by one’s preferred spirit animal, the oliphaunt or the jackass—the real malefactors are free to do as they please.
Each side of the political spectrum has its own bugaboos—the archetypes, sometimes true-to-life and sometimes cartoonish, that plague society and ruin life for the rest of us honest people. If only The Other Side didn’t support and enable these horrible people (they say), America would be a better place.
Nemesis of the right: the Welfare Queen
While the abuse of the welfare system (formally, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program) is not specific to any gender, the archetype is that of a woman who deliberately births multiple children in order to qualify for greater monetary benefits.
In addition to the fact that this is a cynical and unethical use of taxpayer money, this has obvious negative effects for society and directly for the children themselves. Born carelessly into a disadvantaged environment, raised (if raised at all) by parents—often by a single mother—who never really wanted them and can’t afford them… the angry, moralizing opinion pieces write themselves.
Nemesis of the left: the Fat Cat Billionaire
The worst excesses of capitalism, exemplified by the robber barons of the Gilded Age and reincarnated as the cocaine-fueled “greed is good” frenzy of the 1980s, convert human toil and misery into profit for a select few. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer, and even as the gap grows, those who are at the top are pulling the ladder up behind them.
These 1-percenters have more money than they could possibly ever need. In Russian, it’s called “being driven mad by [one’s own] fat” («с жиру беситься»). How else would you explain the need to buy a yacht so big that a European city has to remove a bridge to let it pass? The worst part is, they do not pay their fair share!1
How is this even possible?
How is it that these two archetypes, so far apart by every intersectional indicator, arouse such enduring and pervasive resentment? And why are they still around, if they are so destructive to our nation’s very soul? I submit it’s because seemingly nothing can be done about them.
Public entitlements are like entropy under the Second Law: non-decreasing. It is, for all practical purposes, impossible to remove a welfare program once it’s been established. No politician would dare vote against Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (“Social Security”), or TANF, or SNAP (“food stamps”), or any such program—their career would be over.
It’s all the fault of the bleeding-heart liberals: they are the ones who will never allow meaningful welfare reform!
Similarly, any attempt to make the rich pay “their fair share” is doomed to fail. They will harness an army of high-priced lawyers and accountants to find tax shelters and loopholes. And if they can’t find any existing loopholes in the law and the tax code, they will harness an army of high-priced lobbyists to get a new loophole added.
It’s all the fault of the greedy, pro-business and anti-human conservatives: they are the ones who keep making it easier for Big Business to steamroll the little guy and to squeeze the life out of the common man!
So close and yet still missing the point
If all the best spots in a parking lot are reserved for handicapped drivers, one might have a number of legitimate negative reactions (depending on the details, of course). One may think that too many spots are reserved; that the spots are too big; that the criteria for qualifying as “handicapped” are too broad. These are all potentially valid opinions and they can form the basis for changes to the law based on rational discussion.
But what we cannot do, is be angry with handicapped drivers who use these parking spots. They are exercising their rights and privileges as spelled out and guaranteed by the law. The problem—if there is one—is with the law.
The villain is not the Welfare Queen, nor is it the Fat Cat Billionaire. They are acting in their rational self-interest, taking advantage of the rules and systems that our lawmakers and regulators have created.
They are both symptoms of a deeper underlying disease—the same disease in both cases. What’s the thing both have in common?
It’s the government.
The government, with its Munchausen-by-proxy false compassion, creates welfare programs—ostensibly to help the poor, but in reality to perpetuate the poor’s dependence on that government for continued handouts. Yes, the rich-poor divide is growing, and more and more Americans are struggling financially—but it also creates a population that’s permanently addicted to public entitlements. Plus, it allows the government to feel good about themselves! They are, after all, helping the less fortunate—people who couldn’t possibly fend for themselves without the government’s benevolent patronage.
The government, with its thirst for campaign contributions and its incestuous revolving-door cross-employment program with major industries, quite deliberately creates loopholes in laws and regulations. It is in these custom-made loopholes that Big Business finds its real advantage. The more sections and sub-paragraphs and conditional clauses there are in a rule, the more likely that someone will be able to exploit some “unintended consequence”.
The government afflicts us with Congressional earmarks and rider clauses and obscure regulations and oppressive red tape and stultifying bureaucracy and executive overreach and thousand-page bills and a million other things, denying us our ability—our right!—to live our lives.
Nothing unites people and mobilizes them to action like a common enemy. But the enemy is not the Welfare Queen or the Fat Cat Billionaire. The mistake we’ve made is in allowing ourselves to be split into two camps, each at war with the other.
It is the government—our government!—that is simultaneously telling all of us that our enemy walks among us. I say “all of us” and not “both sides”, because we are all on the same side: our own. We must stop viewing each other with fear and hatred, and instead turn our eyes to the one who is telling us to fear and hate ourselves.
And since ‘tis, after all, the season, I would like to close with the following:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Q: Just how much is a “fair share”? A: More.