David McElroy

Most people who want smaller government are still putting their faith in electing politicians to shrink the size of government. Will you give up this fantasy when you find out that half of the population now gets some form of government benefit?

One of the points I keep making is that most people don’t want individual freedom and personal responsibility. They want a Nanny State to take care of things. To make matters worse, as more and more people get a check of some kind from that Nanny State, they’re happy to support coercion. Their only concern is increasing the amount of money they get, not reducing the size of the Nanny State.

According to U.S. Census data, 48.5 percent of Americans lived in households receiving federal “benefits” of some sort or another in the first quarter of 2010. The numbers are going up as the economy gets worse. So how much support do you really think there is for the sorts of cuts that are necessary to keep the U.S. economy (or the world economy) from collapsing?

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I have to admit that I don’t like banks. Their persnickety rules and condescending attitudes have irritated me over the years in more ways than I can list here. So this might be the first time that I’ve ever been forced to defend a bank. Well, sort of, anyway.

You might have heard the news that Bank of America is instituting a $5-per-month charge for customers using its debit card. When I first heard this, I was outraged, because I knew that the banks were compensated by getting a small slice of each transaction the card is used for. What I didn’t realize at first, though, is that Congress just intervened in the market to cut that fee almost in half, taking away a big chunk of revenue for the banks.

Previously, every time you used your debit card, the bank received a fee from the merchant of 44 cents for handling the transaction. But in an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial law, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) got that fee cut to 24 cents per swipe. In one giant bite, banks had their income from their debit card operations slashed by roughly 45 percent.

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Even though politicians like to pretend otherwise, there is no economic recovery going on. It’s pure fiction. No matter how much money Ben Bernanke shoves out the door of his helicopter, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men haven’t been able to put the economy together again.

Instead of facing the reality that what the Fed has been doing for the past few years can’t work and won’t work, Bernanke told Congress this week that the Fed is ready and willing to intervene yet again. He vaguely warned, though, that the Fed can’t do everything:

“Fostering healthy growth and job creation is a shared responsibility of all economic policymakers, in close cooperation with the private sector,” Bernanke said.

In other words, we need a new Five Year Plan, comrades.

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