Extending unemployment benefits, according to the Democratic representative in this video, is a “no-brainer.” Notice that not a single Congressional leader on this board argues against the program on moral-philosophical grounds. Even the one – count ’em, ONE – Republican member who actually voted against this measure (all the rest of the bumbling morons voted in favor) made his case, not based on the rights of the individual, but on practical considerations, like the impact these benefits will have on state and federal budgets, the cost of the program to taxpayers, and what it will do, along with our nearly insolvent entitlements programs, to our national debt. While I most certainly commend him for taking a stand and doing the right thing, especially when he risks the ire of “gimme what I’m entitled to” voters back home, I was disappointed that he couldn’t find a single negative thing to say about the program itself, instead resorting to a discussion about mere financial concerns. Even if Wisconsin’s finances were in good shape, it would still be wrong to forcibly confiscate the earnings of some Wisconsinites for the unearned benefit of others. “We don’t have the money for it” will not and cannot serve as the official argument against the Establishment’s favorite, vote-buying welfare programs.

Forced wealth transfers can never be morally justified. Just because a thief calls himself an IRS agent doesn’t make his blind acts of aggression any more righteous than if you or I did the same thing. I sympathize with the plight of the unemployed just as much as the next person, but that doesn’t mean I can break into your home, shove a gun against your head, and tell you to “pay up” or else. It doesn’t matter if I plan on giving the loot to some dedicated single father of three who, despite all the job applications he has filled out and all his driving back and forth through the city streets, isn’t able to find work so he can earn the money he needs to feed his children and put a roof over their heads. Theft is theft, regardless of what the humanitarian justifications for it may be. And the same rule applies to agents of the State. If I can’t loot the pocketbooks or raid the bank accounts of my fellow citizens, just so I can lend some jobless person a helping hand, neither can the government in the name of promoting the “greater good.” Calling it “taxation” is just a veil for what really amounts to nothing more than a state-sanctioned crime against the essence of life itself: the right to work hard and reap the rewards of one’s industry.

What exactly do I mean by “reap the rewards of one’s industry?” As I’ve briefly explained elsewhere:

Since each person owns himself or herself, and no person owns another, each person owns the fruits of his production, the things he has obtained through peaceful and voluntary exchange, and the gifts given to him by others. The word “property” refers to anything and everything we own, everything that belongs to us, everything that’s ours – granted we didn’t steal it from somebody else or blow their brains out in the process. Not only do we own the laptops, cell phones, bifocals, clothing items, food packages, and other trinkets in our possession, but we also own the money we’ve earned in exchange for the goods and services we have produced, whether as a factory hand working in exchange for an agreed-upon wage or as a businessman selling what he and his firm have created in exchange for whatever customers are willing to pay for it.

Next time you collect that check at the welfare office, or buy groceries with your food stamps, or take advantage of a farm subsidy program, or send your child to a public school, or retire on a government pension, or receive bailout money and federal “assistance” for your company, or sign up for a Pell Grant program, or open up your mailbox and grab that Social Security check, or solicit jobless benefits from the government, just remember: the money to pay for these things comes from the blood and sweat and hard work of your fellow citizens. Nothing in life is “free,” and that includes each and every service our “public-spirited” government overlords graciously bestow upon us.

Even from an economic perspective, unemployment benefits are bad policy. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. And, as the legendary free market economist Milton Friedman once said, if you pay people not to work, and tax them when they do, you shouldn’t be surprised if the result is unemployment. The unintended consequence of this superficially plausible government program is to artifically reduce the cost of being unemployed. It’s not uncommon that, in any given neighborhood, taking advantage of this taxpayer-financed “freebie” actually pays more than, say, applying for a minimum-wage, entry-level job pumping gas or bagging groceries. In one of his brief, one-hour documentaries on the FOX News Network, television commentator John Stossel interviewed several employment agency representatives who were trying to help people find work. What these representatives had to say in response to his investigate inquiry is instructive. One of the most common complaints was that jobless folks on the receiving end of phone calls turned down job openings precisely because they were already collecting unemployment checks. “No, thanks, I’m on unemployment,” was a common response to job offers. To be sure, one must provide evidence that he is actively “seeking” employment in order to remain eligible for the assistance. But, as Stossel demonstrates, it’s super-easy to game the system and “pretend” you are looking around for work when you actually have no intention of doing so. According to many of Stossel’s interviewees, somewhere around a third of the people who show up for job interviews don’t look prepared. Some of them wear t-shirts and pajama pants; others wear ripped jeans and slippers. Does anyone honestly think that someone who shows up wearing that is taking his interview seriously?

In that same documentary, Stossel also cited a survey showing that one-third of the program’s recipients find jobs immediately after the benefits run out. Maybe it’s not so far-fetched and “kooky” to suggest that maybe – just maybe – jobless benefits distort incentives in the labor market. After all, we have a particularly curious example courtesy of Denmark, where laid off workers were, at one point, eligible for unemployment benefits for a period of up to five years. Five years. And when did people actually start looking for work? After the five years were up. So government officials decided to experiment a little and tweak the program just to see what would happen. Extensions, to the teary-eyed objections of the woe-as-me crowd, were reduced to a four-year period. And, again, when did people actually start looking for work? After the four years were up. Benefits have now been slashed in half. Any fool could predict what happens next.

A friend of mine once lived in an apartment room across from a guy who, in spite of the myriad entry-level jobs in his neighborhood, simply refused to work. A former union member, no less. He was perfectly qualified to take a job at the local Shell station or supermarket. But, in his view, it was his God-given right to pursue whatever profession he damned pleased, and force middle-class taxpayers to pay his bills until he could finally find the dream job he was looking for. Perhaps it should be no surprise by now that he was a recipient of government-administrated jobless benefits. This attitude is not uncommon among a sizable portion of people collecting checks from this program. “To take a minimum-wage job at some crummy, run-down shop is beneath me. My level of training and experience entitles me to a more suitable, less demeaning occupation. I deserve better.”

I can assure you that, if this program vanished tomorrow, people like the folks described above would be clammering for the jobs they once considered themselves “overqualified” for. Instead of asking the government to pick the pockets of their fellow Americans, some would move in with their parents. Some would sell their fancy cars, stop buying expensive dinners on a credit card, and cut the excess stuff out of their budgets. They would take shorter showers, auction off their televisions and laptops, moderate their food intake, and rent cheap apartments in the city (as some working-class Americans have already done). Instead of purchasing every pretty shirt they can get their hands on, some would ask relatives for slightly torn-up hand-me-downs. Private charities, local parishes, wealthy philanthropists, and mutual aid organizations would rush to help those in dire need of financial assistance, as they have always done. The world would not spin off its axis. Normal people would find solutions to these problems. We don’t need politicians to do it for us.

Hearing the way some people talk about the government’s “moral duty” to provide all of these benefits, you’d think that the resources to pay for these things came from some magical money fountain hidden deep within the forest somewhere, or a golden treasure box tucked away at the back of some legislator’s closet. Nary a soul questions where “government money” actually comes from. They just assume that there is some unlimited supply of funds to tap into, and that politicians who propose cutting back on the never-ending stream of handouts and largesse are just doing it for the kicks. The populists bang their drums and sing their battlecries. “American politicians are being too stingy with der unemployment checks! In an economy battered by years of wildcat speculation and banking, der jaybs are in short supply. Pepple can’t afford to put food on teh table, heat der homez, put gas in der cars, and send their kidsies to colle-dge,” and so on and so forth in a never-ending diatribe about who-knows-what. I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but politicians do not have a direct line of credit to Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Government does not create “wealth” out of thin air, donut sprinkles, and rainbow popsicles. The money to pay for these things has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere begins and ends with the American public. Government merely seizes “wealth” that has already been created by the rest of us. It does not produce anything. It is merely a parasitic leech on the productive activities of the citizens.

This should not be a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around. There is, after all, no such thing as a free lunch. Governments gather the money and resources needed to dole out the goods by using three primary sources, none of which involve magic, fairies, or mystical leperchauns. The first, of course, is taxation, which merely involves the seizing of funds that might otherwise be used for other, more productive purposes. Instead of, say, investing in a piece of capital machinery that streamlines costs, boosts labor productivity, expands the supply of available goods in the economy, and applies downward pressure to prices, an entrepreneur pays that same amount of money in taxes to support people who are not working. A couple billion dollars in unemployment benefits means a couple billion dollars more in taxes, which means the private sector has a couple billion dollars less to spend on stuff that consumers prefer and the market demands. Who knows what employers might have done with that money had it not been snatched away from them through taxes? Perhaps they would have used the money to expand their enterprises, conduct more research, or – dare I say it – put unemployed people to work. We see the government handing out checks to folks who can’t find a decent, well-paying job, but what we don’t see is the goods that might have been produced, the services that might have been provided, and the jobs that might have been created had that money not been taxed out of the private economy.

But the government can simply borrow the funds it needs to pay for these programs, you say. It doesn’t need to tax the public if it wants to continue with its “noble” act of alleviating social strife during these tough economic times. And thus we come to our second method of government revenue collection: the much-beloved flurry of borrowing from foreign nations and domestic lenders to pay for the extravagant luxuries of today. As you can probably already tell, politicians like to borrow money – a lot. Just look at the gargantuan size of our national debt. Using borrowed funds to pay for all of these “freebies” is popular among members of the political class because it soothes the ire of the American public, who want all the goodies, but none of the taxes. What is conveniently left out of the typical Keynesian narrative is that money borrowed eventually has to be re-paid. Not only does this mean draconian tax hikes and economic impoverishment for unborn generations of Americans – Jefferson called it “swindling futurity on a large scale” – but it also means a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the shoulders over those in the business community, who know that, when the bill comes due, they will be called upon to pay their “fair share” of mandatory dues to the government. This uncertainty translates into lower levels of private investment and job creation. And it’s not only the debt itself that will have be re-paid, but also the billions of dollars in interest on that debt. Direct taxation may wreak its havoc in the short term, but borrowing wreaks more havoc in the long term. Even within the confines of the immediate present, borrowing does its damage to the private economy. After politicians borrow money from domestic lenders to pay for all of our lavish spoils, the pool of available capital from which businessmen and entrepreneurs can draw funds to use towards investment and job creation is drastically reduced. And with our foreign creditors on the cusp of requesting higher interest rates and bond yields to offset the risk of default, our economic outlook looks grim.

The third and final method of financing government largesse is the most convenient, and probably most sinister, of them all. It involves – you guessed it – asking the Fed to fire up the printing presses. The end result is a devaluation of the currency, reduced purchasing power for consumers, and price inflation. And that’s not good for the economy, either.

Who’da thunk? Unemployment benefits, along with the rest of the welfare-warfare state package, destroy and displace private sector jobs. It’s not merely that they keep people from working by paying them not to. It’s not merely that they pick the pockets of some Americans for the unearned benefit of others. It’s not merely that they foster child-like dependency on the State and undermine individual self-reliance, or discourage people from making necessary lifestyle changes to keep themselves afloat, or heap an additional burden onto our already unsustainable national debt. But they also, among other things, batter the economy and reduce the number of productive jobs created.

The unemployment compensation racket must come to an end, and it must come to an end now. The sooner this atrocious government policy is cast away, and the sooner we realize how truly counterproductive it is, the sooner we can start taking baby-steps toward economic recovery and get jobless folks working again.

Or, we could continue with the policy of paying people not to work and taxing them when they do. What lies in store might surprise us. Then again, maybe not.