Over 1,000 pages of materials and outlines in the bill… and it passed in just over 10 hours.  No one had a chance to read the entire bill in the form that sped through the House and Senate.  As if that weren’t reason enough to be suspicious…  The House passed it without a single Republican vote, while the Senate passed it with only 3 Republican votes.  One of the largest spending initiatives in history from a government that has no idea what it’s doing.

It was doomed to die from the start.  Why?  The reason has nothing to do with the fact that it’s a spending package.  It all goes back to the heart of free-market economics and what Ludwig von Mises calls “Liberalism”.

But what is liberalism?  Liberalism is the foundation of limited government based on the common belief that individual liberty to prosper in an unequal system is best.  By unequal I mean a system where there is no balance of wealth: the rich can become more prosperous, the poor poorer, etc.

So how does liberalism play into the economic package passed last week?  It’s not just this one bill that’s doomed us to failure.  The United States began a downward trend the minute FDR initiated his “New Deal” package which did absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy.  In fact in 1939 unemployment under the new deal was HIGHER than it had been previous to Roosevelt’s election in 1931.  Even Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., admitted years after the New Deal had been put into place that it did nothing to solve unemployment and didn’t do anything to stimulate the economy.

Why?  Because when you spend money you have to get the money back from somewhere.  So where does it come from?  Taxes…  Money doesn’t come out of thin air, and for every dollar we spend it’s another dollar we have to tax… or more than a dollar once you look at the interest.  The entire basis for the spending packages now and in the past comes because the government 1) recognizes the difference in income/ benefits and 2) believes that reallocation of wealth is more beneficial than leaving it in the hands of the “wealthy.”

What that means is that every stimulus package comes amidst a philosophical mindset of government intervention that necessitates more intervention to provide for the adverse of effects of spending and taxing.  It’s a perpetually degenerating system that always requires more involvement to “solve” for the problems it creates.  By that token alone we only dig ourselves into a deeper hole every time the government ignores the freedom of the individual in a concerted effort to bring those who aren’t as well off back into the arms of prosperity.

This system has a name, and it’s called socialism.

All socialistic societies lead to more intervention and regulation and less innovation, because the government becomes the provider and the allocator of knowledge and resources.  The question then becomes not whether or not we spend money to try to save capitalism.  We’re too long-gone to try to salvage a capitalistic/free-market system.  The question we now must face is whether or not we let a system so bereft survive or raise it from the ground up.