Using The Government
The government is not a person. You cannot steal from the government, because the government has no legitimate claim to anything of value. All the wealth the government controls is stolen wealth, stolen from the productive members of that society over which the government exercises it’s coercive power.
There is a question that comes up from time-to-time related to things like social security. The question usually takes the from of a “moral” question: “can an independent individualist morally collect social security?”
The answer I am about to give is not meant as an absolute. This is the kind of issue every individual must answer for themselves and must be certain they do not evade their own principles and must choose to do what is right, according to those principles, whatever the cost might be.
The issue is, since all the wealth the government controls is stolen wealth, receiving anything of value from the government is essentially receiving stolen goods. Accepting any form of government benefit makes oneself a second- hand thief.
The Immorality of Government Benefit
There is a very important difference between Social Security and every other kind of government, “benefit,” program, which is the lie on which the Social Security scam is based�the lie that Social Security recipients are only receiving their own money which was confiscated by the government from individual’s earned income in the form of FICA deductions.
In truth, the government squandered that money long ago, and what is payed to Social Security recipients today is money freshly confiscated from today’s producers.
At first blush it would seem there is no way to justify anyone accepting Social Security payments, and anyone convinced of that moral position certainly should not accept them.
But I think there are three things missing in this view:
Those who are retired today, had a huge amount of money confiscated from them, and justice would require that stolen money to be restored to those who rightfully earned or produced it.
Whatever amount of wealth the government controls today would be less the very same amount confiscated from all those on whom FICA taxes were levied if the government had not stolen that money.
The government is an immoral agency of coercion and whatever harms that agency is a moral virtue.
It’s Not a Benefit
If a burglar enters my home, robs me of ten thousand dollars worth of jewelry, and ten years later is caught and is forced to pay me ten thousand dollars in restoration, I have not received a ten thousand benefit, I have only received what was rightfully mine.
It would not matter if the burglar had fenced the jewelry and spent the money or how he acquired the ten thousand dollars used to pay me, nor is the morality of my “accepting” what is mine affected by either.
For those over a certain age, whether retired or soon to be (within ten years, perhaps) my personal opinion is, there is nothing immoral about receiving social security payments, because it is not a “benefit,” it is restoration of what was stolen from them.
It does not matter where the government actually gets that money, all government wealth is stolen. There is no way to identify which money was stolen from whom.
Those who are understand the nature of the scam that social security is and are young enough to provide for their own retirement ought to plan to do that now. Even if they do that, it would not be immoral to receive the money stolen from them when they have the opportunity, but it is a mistake to count on it.
The Ragnar Danneskj�ld Option
One of Ayn Rand’s three heroes in Atlas Shrugged was the pirate, Ragnar Danneskj�ld, who stole from the government, mostly foreign headed to other countries, which he converted to gold and returned to the industrialists and business men from whom the bulk of government wealth had been confiscated.
In Rand’s novel, the government was eventually destroyed when source of its, the productive creators of society, stopped producing, thus depriving the government of the wealth it depended on. Ragnar’s piracy accelerated that collapse.
One of the great problems for almost all Western countries today is the growing older-aged population that no long produces wealth the government can confiscate and in fact becomes a drain on government resources by receiving social security (or other “retirement” benefits).
For those who would like to see the demise of government, accepting social security payments is one way to help impoverish the government, like Ragnar Danneskj�ld, without having to be a pirate, because the government delivers those payments itself�it is a wonderful way to use the government against itself.