Kellyanne Conway, President-elect Donald Trump's campaign manager, said Sunday morning that the billionaire will stick to his pledge to "drain the swamp" and that "the gravy train is about to have its wheels blown off."
Refreshing language, indeed. And let’s hope it comes to pass.
But we have to remember: The Republicrat establishment politicians in the imperial city are a symptom more than a cause. They are the symptom of a welfare-entitlement-regulatory state wildly out of control.
Why do we have such an entitlement state in the first place? Consider what “entitlement” means. It refers to people who feel entitled to goods, services, money, or property that does not belong to them.
This includes everything from food stamps to automobile subsidies to bank bailouts to unprofitable “green energy” grants. It also includes free health care, free cell phones, subsidized education, ethanol subsidies, on and on and on. . . .
To blow the wheels off the gravy train, we have to blow up the idea that any person is entitled to the wealth and prosperity of another. That ingrained notion will be much harder to fight than anything Donald Trump encountered in his presidential campaign.
“Finally, the voters got what they wanted, what they've been begging for for 30 years, which is to give us the opportunity, give us a person who actually represents the outsider, non-Washington, business-experienced type of profile, somebody who goes to Washington owing nobody anything,” said Conway.
It is refreshing. And it’s an amazing opportunity. But to accomplish those goals, we’ll have to demand that all elected officials replace the idea of entitlement with the idea of liberty. That was the original American idea: The liberty to pursue happiness, not to be given happiness.
Many years ago, the gravy train came into existence because our politicians shifted their focus away from the protection of individual rights and people’s sovereignty over their own lives and property. This gave rise to the now morally and fiscally bankrupt gravy train.
As the astute 19th century thinker Frederic Bastiat observed, “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” That’s exactly what Washington, D.C. has become.
It started well before Obama, but in the last few years has spiraled down to its ugliest breaking point when Obama and so-called “conservatives” joined forces to turn our once noble nation’s capital into what economist David Stockman has correctly labeled the imperial city.
Bastiat also referred to the welfare-entitlement state as legalized plunder. That’s precisely what our federal government has become. It’s no longer about the protection of individual citizens from the violence or fraud of criminals.
As Hillary Clinton and her cohorts at the Department of Justice demonstrated, the most powerful politicians are, in fact, the criminals; having been charged with the redistribution of trillions of dollars that never belonged to them. It should have never been in their hands in the first place.
Such power would corrupt a saint.
If America is to become great again, we have to separate economy and state in the same way and for the same reasons church and state are separate (to paraphrase Ayn Rand).
Nothing else will promote justice or prosperity. Trump’s proposals for cutting down or even eliminating the EPA, eliminating the federal Department of Education, slashing spending, repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, partially privatizing the sale of health insurance and possibly even our cherished “entitlement” programs all represent the right attitude and a great start.
Keep in mind that without gravy, there is no gravy train. Eventually, the people propping up our $20 trillion-in-debt welfare state will run out of money.
In fact, it has already happened, and that’s one big reason we have President Trump.
More than that, they will run out of resolve to keep it going.
Trump’s election is a very real indication of how socialism and politically created gravy trains have their limits. Here’s hoping we bring this massive gravy train to a halt, or at least severely slow it down.
This is your last chance, President Trump and America. Don’t blow it!
Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D., LCSW is a psychotherapist and author with a private practice in coastal Delaware. He is the author of “Bad Therapy, Good Therapy (and How to Tell the Difference).” For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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