How Government Destroys Moral Character

by Robert Higgs: "

...I thought about this matter for the umpteenth time when I read an October 15, 2006, Washington Post story by Gilbert M. Gaul, Dan Morgan, and Sarah Cohen, 'Aid Is a Bumper Crop for Farmers.' The story concerns the widespread practice of farmers' receiving, first, subsidies to purchase crop insurance, then payments from that insurance when their crops fall short, and then, on top of that payoff, additional government payments denominated 'disaster aid.' Many farmers routinely collect large amounts of money from the public treasury by means of this double-dipping – altogether they've extracted almost $24 billion from taxpayers to fund crop-insurance and disaster-aid programs since 2000. The reporters interviewed several farmers and others not only about the workings of these programs but also about their propriety. Although none of the recipients quoted in the article exactly gloated about his serial commission of the offense, none chose simply to condemn it, either. The prevailing attitude seems to be the one expressed by farmer Charles Fisher, of Tulare County, California: "Whether it's right or wrong, if they are offering it, you're foolish to turn it down." In that single sentence, Fisher has encapsulated the rotten core of the welfare state, and he has concisely expressed how such a state destroys the people's moral character. The loot is there for the taking; you're a fool not to take it, notwithstanding that your taking it may be wrong. Financial gain trumps moral probity. Don't be a chump; take the money. I don't know Charles Fisher, but if he is like a great many others who profit by despoiling their fellow man, with government acting as the facilitator of the crime, then I suspect that he is probably not the kind of man who would pocket his neighbor's wallet if he saw it fall to the ground unnoticed, and he is almost certainly not the kind of man who would wait beside the road to carry out an armed robbery of the first passer-by. Yet he will steal from countless strangers – in effect, a little bit from everyone who pays federal taxes – "whether it's right or wrong," simply to bulk up his income from farming. (Needless to say, the so-called disaster payments rarely go to anyone who has suffered a genuine disaster; like most of what the government does, this program is for the most part a sham from the get-go.) It would be tempting to attribute this agri-plunder to some idiosyncratic moral defect caused by the farmers' spending too much time in the sun. We might recall, for example, H. L. Mencken's trenchant description of the American farmer: "No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea." Unfortunately, however, the farmers are morally the same as countless others; they are simply more politically successful than most of the others. Sad to say, for every specific form of farmer swag, the government must open the door to a thousand other sorts of booty completely unrelated to agriculture. The moral rot is comprehensive, not confined to a few bad apples, and it defiles businessmen, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, students, retirees, and countless others along with the farmers. Virtually everybody has checked his morality along with his pistol at the entrance to the legislature. "The state," Frédéric Bastiat told us long ago, "is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else." If only the great man could see us now. Even he might be amazed, and appalled, by the heights to which this futile quest has been raised. In fact, this hoary fantasy arguably has become the central truth about government in our time.

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