Letter on Spending

This is an email I dashed off and sent this morning to a columnist at the New York Observer, for his column “Show Us the Money,” in the July 12, 2010 issue.


To Joe Conason:

Government spending as a means to economic recovery is horrible, rights-violating economics.

The myth that Franklin Roosevelt’s spending during the Great Depression lifted this nation out of that economic catastrophe is well documented in books such as “New Deal or Raw Deal” by Burton Fulsom Jr. Moreover, Obama’s so-called “stimulus” plan has done nothing of substance, and the canard that it saved this nation from sinking into a depression evades the fact that all that money must be paid for one day -- which will further depress the economy and prevent it from growing as it otherwise would under a free, capitalist economy.

That some poll finds a substantial majority of people favor more spending than less just means that most favor bureaucrats and politicians violating their individual rights to their property. Far from being as inevitable as death, taxation is theft and thus a massive violation of every individual’s right to keep his own money and spend it as he sees fit.

Politicians and their constituents who claim some need or some “right” to something -- such as medical care, housing, education -- have no right to these values on anyone’s dime. Those who produce, both rich and poor, have a moral and thus a political right to keep what they have earned, what is in fact theirs, and no ohter individual has any moral claim on it. One individual’s need is not a claim on any other individual’s life and property.

Those who want the government to loot other people’s earnings to spend it on their alleged “rights” to housing, medical care, education and other values had better look to voluntary charity to fulfill their needs, or, better yet, their own productive abilities, if they so chose to employ them.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow NY