New Property Rights

NEW PROPERTY RIGHTS
By
Dr. Jimmie R. Applegate

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy…..” Alexis de Tocqueville
The promises of hope and change were sold by “the talk of the lips”. Americans are painfully aware of the penurious nature of the rest of the story as written in Proverbs 14:23 “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty”.Faced with staggering debt, high unemployment and lingering doubt about the future, the United States has been unable to recover from the Great Recession. Because people living in the United States are faced with these challenges, the opportunity to “profit” from government entitlements, or gratuities, becomes ever more attractive.
The creation and rapid proliferation of these gratuities was followed as sure as death follows life by the development of an “Entitlement Mentality” in the recipients of federal largesse, and among their supporters irrespective of political affiliation.An “Entitlement Mentality” has been defined as “getting something for nothing”. Much like a long sought perpetual motion machine that runs forever without expending any energy, those with an Entitlement Mentality believe they are owed a benefit, or profit, without personally having to expend any energy or “hard work”. The difficulty with this concept is that someone expended energy to produce the benefit or profit they expect to receive without expending any of their energy. As de Tocqueville said, a democracy “can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury….”.
Is there an Entitlement Mentality in the United States? Consider that in 2010 one in six people were in some anti-poverty program. Fifty million people were in Medicaid and the new health care program will add 16M more by 2014. Ten million people were receiving unemployment benefits and 4.4M were on welfare. All of these numbers increased in 2011; e.g., food stamp recipients increased from 40M in 2010 to 45M in 2011 (14.7% of US population).
The Entitlement Mentality has developed with more intensity over time. Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-35) began the revolution with the New Deal programs in 1933 to combat the Great Depression. Democrat President John F. Kennedy (1960-1963) continued federal activities to eliminate poverty and racial injustice with his New Frontier program. And Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson followed with the Great Society. These presidents and their democratic successors, supported by their democratic colleagues in Congress, enacted legislation and encouraged legal interpretation of the Constitution that resulted in the development of an entitlement mentality.
In his seminal article “The New Property” published in the Yale Law Journal (1964, pp.773-87), Charles Reich argued “….certain benefits of core importance to individuals must be held as a right, not as a gratuity”. He argued that since status is so closely related to livelihood and personality, any denial of unemployment compensation, public assistance or old age pensions is inappropriate because they are property rights. The Supreme Court Justices agreed, ‘“It may be realistic today to regard welfare benefits more like ‘property’ than a ‘gratuity’….”’ (397 US 254 1970). Furthermore, public assistance was deemed not mere charity, but a means to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. This decision broadened the traditional interpretation of “property” in the Fourteenth Amendment, and it institutionalized the concept that entitlements such as welfare are property rights.
Reich’s article resulted in changing the consideration of entitlements from a social moral argument to a legal argument based on a questionable interpretation and definition of the constitutionally guaranteed concept of “property rights”. In other words, all men and women may become owners of constitutionally protected “property” by virtue of government entitlement and gratuity support. This means anyone can become a perpetual motion machine and receive “profit” earned by others without the expenditure of energy except the little required to place an X beside the name of a candidate who promises “a chicken in every pot”.
Although the United States is a Democratic Federal Republic, in every day discourse the single word “Democracy” is often used to describe our form of government. If de Tocqueville’s prediction is valid, the current debate surrounding spending (entitlements) vs. revenue (taxation) is much more than a philosophical disagreement between liberal and conservative politicians. It is about the future of the United States of America!