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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

This is the entire article.  Nothing about cops, fireman, or dog-catchers.  
It is about the percentage who 'pays' to the treaury and the percentage who 
'only' takes from the treaury

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November 8, 2008 7:00 AM

The Death of the American Idea
An electorate living high off the entitlement hog.

By Mark Steyn

‘Give me liberty or give me death!”

“Live free or die!”

What's that? Oh, don't mind me. I'm just trying out slogans for the 2012 
campaign and seeing which one would get the biggest laughs.



My Republican friends are now saying, oh, not to worry, look at the exit 
polls, this is still a “center-right” country. Americans didn't vote to go 
left, they voted to go cool. It was a Dancing With The Stars election: 
Obama's a star and everyone wants to dance with him. It doesn't mean they're 
suddenly gung-ho for left-wingery.

Up to a point. Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun 
the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to “go 
left.” Yet oddly enough that's where they've all gone. In its assumptions 
about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced 
nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter. Even in America, federal 
spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 
1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient 
graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up. 
Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. 
The government just grows and grows, remorselessly. Every two years, the 
voters walk out of their town halls and school gyms and tell the exit 
pollsters that three-quarters of them are “moderates” or “conservatives” (ie, 
the center and the right) and barely 20 per cent are
 “liberals.” And then, regardless of how the vote went, big government just 
resumes its inexorable growth.

“The greatest dangers to liberty,” wrote Justice Brandeis, “lurk in the 
insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without 
understanding.”

Now who does that remind you of?

Ha! Trick question! Never mind Obama, it's John McCain. He encroached on our 
liberties with the constitutional abomination of McCain-Feingold. 
Well-meaning but without understanding, he proposed that the federal 
government buy up all these junk mortgages so that people would be able to 
stay in “their” homes. And this is the “center-right” candidate? It's hard 
for Republicans to hammer Obama as a socialist when their own party's 
nationalizing the banks and its presidential nominee is denouncing the 
private sector for putting profits before patriotism. That's why Joe the 
Plumber struck a chord: he briefly turned a one-and-a-half party election 
back into a two-party choice again.

If you went back to the end of the 19th century and suggested to, say, 
William McKinley that one day Americans would find themselves choosing 
between a candidate promising to guarantee your mortgage and a candidate 
promising to give “tax cuts” to millions of people who pay no taxes he would 
scoff at you for concocting some patently absurd H G Wells dystopian fantasy. 
Yet it happened. Slowly, remorselessly, government metastasized to the point 
where it now seems entirely normal for Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Florida to 
vote for Obama because “I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I 
won't have to worry about paying my mortgage.”

While few electorates consciously choose to leap left, a couple more steps 
every election and eventually societies reach a tipping point. In much of the 
west, it's government health care. It changes the relationship between state 
and citizen into something closer to pusher and junkie. Henceforth, elections 
are fought over which party is proposing the shiniest government bauble: If 
you think President-elect Obama's promise of federally subsidized day care 
was a relatively peripheral part of his platform, in Canada in the election 
before last it was the dominant issue. Yet America may be approaching its 
tipping point even more directly. In political terms, the message of the 
gazillion-dollar bipartisan bailout was a simple one: “Individual 
responsibility” and “self-reliance” are for chumps. If Goldman Sachs and AIG 
and Bear Stearns are getting government checks to “stay in their homes” (and 
boardrooms, and luxury corporate retreats), why
 shouldn't Peggy Joseph?

I don't need Barack Obama's help to “spread the wealth around.” I spread my 
wealth around every time I hire somebody, expand my business, or just go to 
the general store and buy a quart of milk and loaf of bread. As far as I 
know, only one bloated plutocrat declines to spread his wealth around, and 
that's Scrooge McDuck, whose principal activity in Disney cartoons was 
getting into his little bulldozer and plowing back and forth over a mountain 
of warehoused gold and silver coins. Don't know where he is these days. On 
the board at Halliburton, no doubt. But most of the beleaguered band of 
American capitalists do not warehouse their wealth in McDuck fashion. It's 
not a choice between hoarding and spreading, but a choice between who spreads 
it best: an individual free to make his own decisions about investment and 
spending, or Barney Frank. I don't find that a difficult question to answer. 
More to the point, put Barney & Co in charge of the spreading,
 and there'll be a lot less to spread.

I disagree with my fellow conservatives who think the Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Frank 
liberal behemoth will so obviously screw up that they'll be routed in two or 
four years' time. The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 
per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those 
that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as 
Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole. By 
2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the 
majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from 
the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize 
self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny 
state. That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an 
economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying 
cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass
 appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement 
hog that it's unsustainable and you've got to give some of it back?

At that point, America might as well apply for honorary membership in the 
European Union. It will be a nation at odds with the spirit of its founding, 
and embarking on decline from which there are few escape routes. In 2012, the 
least we deserve is a choice between the collectivist assumptions of the 
Democrats, and a candidate who stands for individual liberty — for economic 
dynamism not the sclerotic “managed capitalism” of Germany; for the First 
Amendment, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion; for 
self-reliance and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which 
Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they're 
photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily 
business. In Forbes this week, Claudia Rosett issued a stirring defense of 
individual liberty. That it should require a stirring defense at all is a 
melancholy reflection on this election season. Live free — or
 die from a thousand beguiling caresses of nanny-state sirens.