In the free market, a man born into wealth or who has otherwise acquired great riches can lose his fortune depending on how he chooses to behave. Conversely, a man born into poverty or who has lost wealth once obtained can acquire a fortune, depending, again, on how he chooses to behave.

So virtuous are the programs said to be - pensions for the elderly, compensation for the unemployed, medicine for the sick, and assistance for the disabled - few dare ring the alarm of looming economic catastrophe that threatens to destabilize the civil society.

And it makes you wonder—how can a people incapable of selecting their own lightbulbs and toilets possess enough competence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns?

Consequently, citizen legislators, rotating back to their communities after a short period of public service—considered an indispensable and routine characteristic and design of representative government at the time of the founding, and for a century thereafter—have been replaced with a professional ruling class led by governing masterminds. For the most part, they are isolated from the communities from which they hail and are consumed with the daily jockeying for position and power within their ranks. Moreover, they both pander to and lord over their constituents.

Taxation of private property, or the regulation of such property so as to reduce its value, can become in effect a form of servitude.

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.

Social Security is a widely popular program because the individual has been deceived by the Statist to believe that the government has been prudently and diligently managing his accumulated pension investment in his Social Security account, which he presumes to be funded by his own payroll taxes.