David McElroy

When people start getting checks from the government, they suddenly see government in a very different light. However they might have felt about transfer payments before, they can find excuses why they’re just fine and dandy, at least in their cases.

People can justify whatever it suits their needs to justify. It’s human nature, and you don’t even know you’re doing it. (You and I do it, too. It’s not just for “welfare queens” or some such silly stereotype.)

Roughly half of U.S. households now have at least one person receiving a check from the federal government, according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. So what does this mean for the future of the welfare state? I think it’s a pretty safe bet that those people are going to mostly be voting in their self-interest. That means they’re going to vote for candidates who promise to keep the cash coming — even if it’s not morally or fiscally responsible.

The truth is that the welfare state isn’t going away now unless the state goes away entirely. You’re never going to change it through voting.

There’s no such thing as what we used to call “welfare” anymore. You can’t get a check just because you’re poor. But 35 percent of the households get some kind of “means-tested” payment. (See Mercatus Center chart below.) The next largest single category is Medicaid, with 26 percent of households getting some kind of benefits. The ever-popular Ponzi scheme called Social Security goes to 16 percent of households. Food stamps and Medicare benefits each go to 15 percent of households. Various other programs send checks to even more households.

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We might all need a little therapy, but sometimes the dog has an entirely different reason for you to spend $120 an hour.

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The Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota is suing five big companies that make beer, asking that they cough up half a billion dollars in compensation for the economic, social and health consequences of their products. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a legal shakedown.

Alcohol is illegal on the tribe’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, but that doesn’t mean the Native Americans who live there don’t drink. There’s a tremendous alcohol problem there. So where do the people get their illegal booze? It mostly comes from a few tiny places such as Whiteclay, Neb., a town of 14 people, whose four beer stores sell an average of 11,000 cans of beer each day.

So legal stores are selling a legal product to people who are legally competent to buy it. So why is the tribe suing the beer companies instead of placing the blame on the people who choose to spend their lives this way? The lawsuit says that the stores sell the beer knowing that the purchasers must be intending to smuggle it onto the reservation, but I still can’t figure out how that makes it the stores’ fault — or the beer-makers’ fault.

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