Is America a “welfare state”? No. It’s a “special interest state.”And James DeLong at the American Enterprise Institute has explained why in THIS ARTICLE. What it boils down to is that the permanent political class has gained permanent power in America, governing on behalf of ubiquitous and multifarious special interests, which increasingly exist solely to loot the public treasury. Worse yet, special interests have no regard to the long-term damages and ultimate destruction that their appetites engender. In short, the iron triangle of the permanent political class, the special interests, and the dependent voters who keep them in office will eventually destroy us. That’s because…
“…a special interest’s appetite has no limit because it gets the benefits while the costs are borne by society at large.”
“A democratic republic cannot long survive as a special interest state,” DeLong explains. “The destruction of economic value is too complete, as interests channel the money into unproductive uses—house and education bubbles; alternative energy; battalions of compliance officers; a ruling class that depends on the iron rice bowl of the government giving its members jobs telling the masses what to do.”
In other words, “the special interest state has no natural equilibrium point, so the question now is not whether but how it will end.” All we can say right now is that “it is characteristic of unstable systems that they continue longer than one would have thought possible, then collapse with great speed.”
We’re just at the waiting phase right now. And if that collapse does indeed come, you won’t want to be where an unproductive majority uses its voting power to look the productive minority.
Where would such a place exist in America? Thanks to the Free State Project and an abundance of indigenous freedom-fighters, it would be New Hampshire. After all, you’ve got to live somewhere, right? So choose: You can live in a socialist or semi-socialist polity where the government exists to steal from the productive and give to the unproductive, which is most of the states in the U.S. Or you can live where that kind of crap isn’t tolerated. Such as, increasingly, New Hampshire.