One of the most sacrosanct beliefs in a libertarian society is the free right to own property. In the most fundamental sense, this property includes personal possessions such as land, homes, automobiles, and other sundry valuables accumulated over time by an individual or family unit. In almost in all cases, this private property is obtained from the fruits of ones’ labor; from participation in free market transactions whether from traditional manufacturing – selling of products, by delivering services and expert advice to someone willing to freely purchase them, or even by speculatively investing where one’s original investment is smaller than the final price obtained when the investment is sold.
How much fruit one obtains in a free society is often distributed unequally within the society and is dependent on a multitude of factors including hard work, skill, education, knowledge, experience, and even plain luck.
For some reason, statists despise the inequality of free markets and the fact that someone can be very successful and accumulate significant wealth by conducting free market commence. To combat this undesirable feature of a capitalist society, statists have created two large classes of the populace who can be ‘fed’ via the taxation or theft from all wage earners, even those who work within the statist system. (Very strange, they give money to someone who works for the state and then tax them to pay for their and other government employees’ wages)
The first class to receive the benefits of redistribution of wealth are government employees. Now mind you, many of these employees provide value to society but given their relegation to being employed by the state instead of the private sector they become a protected class that must be supported by the forcible confiscation of wealth (fruits of one’s labor) from workers.
According to the census bureau’s Government Employment and Payroll measure, the number of federal, state, and local civilian government employees and their gross monthly payroll for March of the survey year can be found at. Survey of Public Employment and Payroll website >>
The number within this class is large and as of March of 2015, there are 14,425,359 people drawing wages via the forced taxation of private property.
The other class of people are those who are made dependent on the state for some portion of their existence. These people receive the fruits of someone’s labor via programs like:
- Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
- Housing Assistance
- Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
- General Assistance (GA)
“Approximately 52.2 million (or 21.3 percent) people in the U.S. participated in major means-tested government assistance programs each month in 2012, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report. “
One final thought to ponder. Do you think these two protected classes (Government employees and people receiving means tested benefits) will ever support changes to our statist system?