The Washington Post, now known as the “Bezos Blog,” recently ran an interesting headline: “Retirees receive six times more in federal dollars than young people.”
We apologize for the Post, that serves as the news source for the community that receives more federal dollars than young people or old people — namely, what Joe Sobran aptly called “The Hive” — Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex” and the insatiable behemoth that it constitutes today.
The headline provokes: “Young people, your parents are robbing you blind!”
Why? Because, as Washington’s multimillionaire Senator-hero Bernie Sanders insisted in March, we don’t tax the rich enough.
You know, those “old people.”
So the young must be stoked to envy, to resentment, and to demand reparations. The Sanders coalition that nominated Joe Biden in 2020 demanded total forgiveness of student loans — a payoff made possible by Barack Obama’s crafty expropriation of that multibillion-dollar portfolio several years earlier.
But to what “federal dollars” does the Post refer? The hundreds of billions they have handed out to their undeserving connivers? The trillions in foreign aid to corrupt countries that have never sent us a dime? The list is endless.
No, the Post is referring to the payments received by retirees under the Medicare and Social Security programs.
And in that regard, their call for a revolution of the young against the old will succeed only if enough of the young have been trained by public school union ideologues to feel so good about themselves that they believe they have a right to resent everybody else, and then rob them blind.
“But we just want to give the young their chance at the American dream,” we might be told. And in that spirit, our beloved and benevolent shepherds have given their imprimatur to federal welfare-state programs for generations.
A brief glance at history will reveal the fruits of such “good intentions” that have been cheered on by these sanctimonious ignorami — foul fruits that have wrought misery and destitution among millions of Americans.
‘We Owe It To Ourselves’
In his first presidential campaign (1932), Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the term “Social Justice” in Detroit just days before the election. In his speech, he praised the principles of Quadragesimo Anno, the 1931 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, which reads in part: “This concentration of power has led to a threefold struggle for domination. First, the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere itself; then the fierce battle to acquire control of the state; finally, the clash between states themselves” (n. 108).
“I quote, my friends,” FDR said, “from the scholarly encyclical issued last year by the pope, one of the greatest documents of modern times:
“ ‘It is obvious in our days that not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the hands of a few’. . . .”
Whereupon Roosevelt proposed a “New Deal” that would expropriate that wealth, immense power, and despotic economic domination and hand it to those of superior knowledge, skill, and virtue — the federal government.
Roosevelt’s campaigns and his New Deal agenda received the support and applause of millions of Americans, as well as of the vast majority of American bishops. That applause only increased after Roosevelt exercised his power by immediately stealing all the gold possessed by American citizens, devaluing their net worth by 40%, and signing the Social Security Act of 1935, which took even more of their money, promising to give it back in the far and distant future, all in the name of “Social Justice.”
When the Supreme Court correctly viewed that act as unconstitutional, Roosevelt sent his Judicial Procedures Reform Bill to Congress in February 1937, threatening to pack the court (a threat which Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.], the Democrat minority leader, repeated six years ago).
In May 1937, the court meekly bowed to Roosevelt’s threat to use his “power and despotic domination,” now concentrated not in the hated sphere of private economic activity, but in the federal (not state and local) government.
Our bishops cheered him on every step of the way. Their spokesman: Fr. Paul Ryan.
Fr. Ryan was a Fabian Socialist who had written the bishops’ first pastoral in 1919. He was a prominent member of the Roosevelt team and held his position in the organization (which we today call the USCCB) from its creation in 1919 until well into the 1940s.
So the act was done. As a result, by design, the Social Security Act takes real money from working Americans month after month, decades on end, and distributes “returns” years later to its “beneficiaries” in depreciated dollars (today the dollar is worth less than one percent of its value when Roosevelt first assumed office in 1933).
All in the name of “Social Justice.”
As a result, in the words of Pius XI, today the American people are bereft of any means “to defend themselves from ill treatment at the hands of the powerful.”
But not to worry. “Fr. Tom,” a Holy Cross priest, taught the required Introduction to American History course that the class of 1968 suffered through in our sophomore year at Notre Dame. As he extolled Roosevelt’s Catholic virtues, he often tripped over the unavoidable problem — debt.
“No problem,” he said. “We owe it to ourselves.”
On Giving And Getting
The Bezos Blog headline above reflects another facet of our bishops’ clueless political agenda: it stokes the envy and anger of the young against their parents, even though both old and young are being robbed every day of their personal hard-earned wealth by the “despotic and domineering” federal government, which our bishops happily cheer on as they cash their checks.
At least two reasons account for this state of affairs. First, rank sanctimony: bishops march proudly in support for “the poor,” specifically in their lobbying forever in favor of increasing government welfare programs that have destroyed the family, deracinated the culture, and created millions of impoverished clients, all in the name of “dignity.”
Second, greed: they get their cut. They might consider their federal funding to be a reward for their superior virtue; but any poolside pol knows that it’s “tit for tat” — if you don’t give, you don’t get. And, as Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker put it some 40 years ago, “that door swings both ways.”
Just ask Blasé Cardinal Cupich and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Both gave, both got.
And the damage continues. For the first time since its inception, our local “Bishop’s Lenten Appeal” has not met its goal this year, even though the diocese comprises Catholics who live in counties that are among the wealthiest in the country — thanks of course to the federal government, which has served as the source of that opulence, all because of the growth of the “powerful and domineering” institution which Roosevelt launched in the name of “Social Justice” with the approval of Pope Pius XI and the American Catholic hierarchy.
But we can’t note the hierarchy’s abject dependence on and support of the Democrat Party without acknowledging that many Catholics shared that support, at least from the 1930s through the mid-1960s.
By then, with LBJ’s war and his Great Society — with its fetid fruits of family planning, the Democrats’ endorsement of Roe v. Wade, a “woman’s right to choose,” and abortion on demand until birth — millions of Catholics had had enough. They soon began to abandon the Democrats, embracing Ronald Reagan’s observation that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”
But our Catholic bishops didn’t leave. Instead, under the banner of “Social Justice” championed by Joseph (later Cardinal) Bernardin, they abandoned the Church’s magisterial truths defended by Pius XI (Casti Connubii, 1930) and Pope St. Paul VI (Humanae Vitae, 1968), and embraced instead the Democrat welfare state.
