Our Government Has Become An Entitlements Machine
Nicholas Eberstadt writes in the WSJ about the expansion of the handout state -- oh, and before you start looking to the usual suspects, the Democrats, entitlement spending was roughly 8% higher in Republican admins.

(As I've said here before, the Republicans, in reality, are the party of slightly less ginormous government -- and a lot of talk about how wonderful they are and how evil the Democrats are for being for entitlements.):

The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects--its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes--the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. ... As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

...In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.

In 2010 alone, government at all levels oversaw a transfer of over $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. The burden of these entitlements came to slightly more than $7,200 for every person in America. Scaled against a notional family of four, the average entitlements burden for that year alone approached $29,000.

A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.

...The proud self-reliance that struck Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s extended to personal finances. The American "individualism" about which he wrote did not exclude social cooperation--the young nation was a hotbed of civic associations and voluntary organizations. But in an environment bursting with opportunity, American men and women viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements--a novel outlook at that time, markedly different from the prevailing attitudes of the Old World (or at least the Continent).

...As Americans opt to reward themselves ever more lavishly with entitlement benefits, the question of how to pay for these government transfers inescapably comes to the fore. ... The taker mentality has thus ineluctably gravitated toward taking from a pool of citizens who can offer no resistance to such schemes: the unborn descendants of today's entitlement-seeking population.

Those who think of this as merely robbing from the rich to pay for the middle class and the poor are wrong. He's right -- it's robbing from unborn babies. This is really what American independence has come to?

Yeah, right, crack another beer and turn up the TV.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. This piece was excerpted from "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic," forthcoming from the Templeton Press in October (not yet on Amazon). His piece ran as a debate or response (hard to tell which) with a piece in the WSJ by William A. Galston, "Are Entitlements Corrupting Us? No -- They're Part of the Civic Compact."

via @rogerkimball