Economist Walter E. Williams: Does an act thats clearly immoral when done privately become moral when it is done collectively and under the color of law? Put another way, does legality establish morality? For most of our history, Congress did a far better job of limiting its activities to what was both moral and constitutional. As a result, federal spending was only 3 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product from our founding until the 1920s, in contrast with todays 25 percent. Close to three-quarters of todays federal spending can be described as Congress taking the earnings of one American to give to another through thousands of handout programs, such as farm subsidies, business bailouts and welfare. ... [S]pending is not our basic problem. Weve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that larger problem.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 03:57:01 +0000
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