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Understanding the American Entitlement System in the Light of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom"

Understanding the American Entitlement System in the Light of Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" Conservatives and Tea Party People Are a Little Confused when They Link Hayek's Road to Serfdom with the Fanatic Growth of American Entitlement Expectations. Americans Are Not Becoming Slaves Because of Welfare but Are Instead Becoming Lex Contributor Network . Don't be fooled by the argument that the welfare system turns people in to mindless entitlement zombies who are sending American down the inevitable pathway to serfdom. This is because welfare recipients are anything but slaves. Slaves never had the right to vote for improvements to their well being nor did they have any say in matters of their welfare. Serfs were slaves that passed as a kind of chattle property attached to the land and in estates of higher classes. There is still serfdom here on planet earth but it is not yet taking hold in the United States of America. One could argue that Cubans under communism are closer to being serfs and slaves to their communist masters but that is not congrous to the American situation. One can't say that Americans have been tricked into voting to get free benefits for themselves because the way government services and goods are sold to voters by politicians is that they can get their fair share or work to pay their way into derserving the entitlements available. The fouinding fathers probably could never have imagined the kind of welfare entitlement system that the united states has evolved into but they were aware of the history of ancient imperial Roman entitement to bread and circuses. In the declaration of independence and US consitution the idea of general popular welfare imagined nothing of the sort we see today because obviously after the revolutionary war "general welfare" included virtually no popular redistribution programs . Even benefits for deserving veterans of the successful revolutionary war found that there was little in the way of compensation even when they ended up disfigured and crippled. Veterans of the revolutionary war may have been celebrated but they would be hard pressed to find any of the levels of benefits veterans now can expect. Amercians are not becoming slaves or serfs because of the social welfare system but they are being stratified into classes. Welfare recipients are finding themselves in a second tiered class as American Nobility. Serfdom could be around the corner in the future if and when the system collapses for lack of anyone left rich enough to tax to pay for the benefits that virtually everyone feels entitled to. At that point a new social order will reveal itself that either swings back to the notion of relative self sufficiency which was the welfare creed of the Revolutionary War days or to some dictatorial totalitarian impossition of slavery for the sake of imperial nationalism and stateism. Today we see the stratification of society by big government serving to create tiers of classes. Since the American super rich started defining themselves as the upper class going back to the days of John Jacob Astor and before that tended to inspire other groups to define themselves as classes. American was a classless society in states without slavery. The well to do classes may have started the trend of turning themselves into nobility and then came the socialists and progressives who wanted nothing more than to use the have the well to do acting like aristocricy. .

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