How Governments Use Your Money, Your Healthcare, and Your Kids to Keep You Dependent

Both Parties Are Running the Same Play

I’ve been doing this for 26 years. Fighting socialism, fighting the road to serfdom, warning people about what happens when government gets too big, too generous, and too comfortable handing out other people’s money. And looking around at where we are today, I have to be honest with myself: I haven’t been winning this fight.

Here’s what bothers me most. People assume this is a Republican versus Democrat issue. It isn’t. Both parties are executing the same long-term playbook, just with different branding. When Republicans are floating proposals to raise payroll taxes to prop up Social Security, they’re not offering a conservative alternative. They’re putting millions of productive Americans into an effective 50-plus percent tax bracket. Call it what you want. A payroll tax is a tax. The Supreme Court settled that. It all goes to the same place.

The Classic Road to Dependency

Let me walk through something I dusted off recently. A list. A framework that describes exactly how a society moves from free to controlled. Not by force, at first. By design.

• Healthcare. Control healthcare and you control people. When someone depends on the government to manage their physical wellbeing, they become far easier to manage in every other way too.
• Welfare and poverty thresholds. Keep moving the goalposts on who qualifies for assistance. Expand the dependent class. More checks mean more loyalty at the ballot box. It really is that simple.
• Debt. Run the national debt up to levels we’re sitting at right now and you create the perfect justification to raise taxes indefinitely. More revenue means more to distribute to whoever you need voting for you next cycle.
• Education. This one keeps me up at night. When teachers unions control curriculum and parents lose visibility into what their kids are learning, you lose a generation’s ability to think critically about any of this.
• Class warfare. Pit people against each other based on income. Keep them angry at their neighbor instead of at the system. It’s a distraction that works every single time.

The Check That Buys Your Vote

J.D. Vance is pushing checks to stay-at-home moms. I’m not saying those families don’t work hard. I’m saying that once you normalize the government writing checks to a voting demographic, that demographic becomes very predictable at election time.

Remember Mitt Romney getting caught on tape saying roughly 50 percent of people wouldn’t vote for him because they were receiving government benefits? Everyone acted horrified. I thought he was stating a basic political reality. What infuriated me was that he then ran away from it instead of making it the centerpiece of an honest conversation about dependency and incentives.

That’s the problem. Nobody wants to have the honest conversation because the honest conversation doesn’t win elections in the short term.

What This Means for Your Financial Life

Here’s why this matters beyond politics. When government expands its footprint the way I’m describing, several things happen to your personal financial picture.

• Tax burdens increase over time, shrinking the capital you have available to invest and build wealth.
• Inflation becomes structural, because spending programs rarely get rolled back once they’re established.
• Real returns on savings get eroded, while the political class debates which new program to launch next.
• Retirement security shifts from something you control to something you’re increasingly told to trust the government to handle.

I’ve watched this movie before. The ending isn’t good for people who work hard, save responsibly, and try to build something independent of government support. The best defense you have is understanding what’s happening, making smart decisions with the assets you control right now, and refusing to let either party convince you that dependency is the same thing as security.