it’s yours. Mine. Ours. I came across this piece, “Despotism–The Soft Way,” from Dr. Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, and it gave me pause to consider how your money, my money, our money, is being used by our government to support and encourage abortion both here and abroad. Have we become so used to the government “bailing us out” every time we have problems that we readily go along with public institutions of immorality? Gregg asks,
Is America on the road to comfortable servility? “The American Republic,” Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, America has slowly drifted towards a political economy of soft despotism. Despite the Reagan Revolution, the trend-lines of government-spending and intervention have been in the anti-liberty direction. Entire constituencies of people now exist who regularly support politicians who promise that, in return for their votes, their entitlements (corporate-welfare, bails-outs for the “too big-to-fail,” the old-fashioned welfare state etc) will be maintained and increased.
