Brits say "the dole," we say "welfare." (Or Medicaid, SNAP, Healthy Michigan, or any number of other welfare programs.)

By whatever name, Powerline Blog's Friday post reminds us that state welfare isn't free money.

It's a tool of control.

And it's a fatal culture that falls for it.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/12/what-happens-when-we-are-all-on-the-dole.php

What Happens When We Are All on the Dole?

Well, I guess that is called socialism. But what about when most people in a modern society are on the dole? The Telegraph reports: “Majority of Britons receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.” Once upon a time, everyone assumed that the vast majority would be taxpayers, and there would be a handful who are unable to care for themselves and would thus be the beneficiaries of state largesse.

But that was before liberal culture began to eat away at the common understanding that went back for millennia:

More than half of people in the UK receive more in benefits than they contribute in taxes, official figures show.

A total of 52.6pc lived in households that received more from the state than they paid to the Treasury last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how voting patterns are likely to change, when over half of a population consists of net recipients of government benefits. They will be sorely tempted to vote for more, since cashing checks is much easier than working.

You might assume that things are different here in the U.S. The majority of our people can’t be on the dole, can they? I don’t know, but I suspect it is getting close. State and local taxes are assessed on a relatively equal basis, but federal income taxes, by far the main source of federal revenue, are assessed overwhelmingly against upper-income taxpayers. And government spending, both state and federal, has exploded far beyond any traditional concept of the role of government as the last-resort supporter of the small minority who can’t care for themselves.

I don’t know whether, in the U.S. as in Britain, more than half of voters are net government beneficiaries. But I wouldn’t be shocked if that were the case; if so, it would explain a lot about voting patterns. The culture that makes everyone a ward of the state is perhaps more advanced in the U.K. than it is here, but it is the culture that is fatal, and we are not immune to it.