Money has, of course, driven humanity mad since we first started trading bright metal for goods and services. However, over the past half century or so, cash has, thanks to unrelenting political pressure and (to be honest) pure and simple self-interest, become the preferred measure of one’s commitment to a wide variety of causes that are fantastically important to some and of no interest whatsoever to most. With an ever burgeoning array of panic porn now lighting up our phone screens, the screams for public money—that will be used used to bully everyone into compliance to avoid the catastrophe du jour—have become positively deafening.

To put it plainly, an incredible array of activists now expect a lovely, validating wad of cash for their pet projects, pet causes, or pet beliefs, all of which are allegedly critical to the safety and well being of our planet and people. Unsurprisingly, tempers get frayed because not everyone is enthusiastic about—or even cares for—their solutions, and money quickly runs short because, contrary to popular Leftist dogma, cash is not unlimited. These difficulties help to drive the online outrage machine that insists the non-believers and fiscally prudent are killing us all, which allows the supposedly virtuous few to push for more power and money.

However, there is a huge problem now arising for the perpetually angry and alarmed among us: We are simply not dying off quickly enough to maintain the level of fear necessary to justify the open-ended expenditures desired by those who are saving us from our doom,—and this inconvenient truth has led a lot of Americans to question why we are continuing to bother and bankrupt ourselves. 

The trillions of dollars we have been robbed of over the past few decades to save Americans from crises that have proven to be either illusory or outright scams is a scandal of monumental proportions. The pointed questions now being asked by so many voters about a range of issues—the Covid-19 epidemic, the illusory climate crisis that has yet to appear, and the presumed prevalence of entrenched bigotries in our country—is today terrifying the “experts” who have enriched and empowered themselves at our expense for many decades.

The loudest and least amicable conflicts today burning across our media and cultural landscape all have to do with government spending. Innumerable community and private organizations across our nation want money from the government to fund their (presumably important) activities. Businesses want to keep the tax breaks and incentives that have allowed them to import cheap manufactured goods from abroad, claiming this is free enterprise, rather than pay fair wages to American workers and strengthen our nation’s industrial base. So-called “immigrant advocates” insist that hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars be spent to reward those who have crashed our borders and now refuse to leave. Educators with highly inappropriate levels of interest in the sexuality of children and adolescents insist on funding to “protect” children through wholesale curricular and classroom indoctrination that crosses the line into grooming. 

Apparently, allowing Americans to simply live their lives, follow their faiths, express their thoughts, and protect their families without being battered by taxpayer-funded propaganda is out of the question—and offensive to the propagandists.

We should always ask questions about how our tax dollars are being spent, and seeking to cut or eliminate programs that seem wasteful or misdirected is not indicative of hatred or bigotry. However, the wails of dismay that are now accompanying long-overdue efforts to rein in government spending are predicated on the belief that any attempt to save money is fascism incarnate—or something. 

Listening, for example, to the outcry over the possibility that NPR (public radio) and PBS (public television) will have their federal funding eliminated, one cannot help but notice the critical distinction so many miss: the right to free speech, which is a Constitutional freedom, and the right to speak with the assistance of public money, which is nowhere guaranteed in our Constitution. This point should be neither confusing nor difficult. Any belief or opinion, no matter how precious they may be to an individual or group, does not automatically qualify for a subsidy, and this must be re-explained as often as necessary to those who love collecting paychecks for running their mouths.

Whatever one might believe—insects are delicious, electric vehicles are reliable, Elvis is still alive—the most fundamental of our American rights is that, unless we are advocating violence, we can state it openly. However, no right to public money or a tax incentives exists, although a huge number of individuals and businesses have spent decades perverting our legislative and judicial systems in order to turn all of us into the unwilling benefactors of those who love spending other people’s money to blare their opinions.

Greedy and grasping individuals have always plagued us—and, sadly, likely always will—but we can, at least, begin to cut off their drain on our public money so that we can redirect that to fund Social Security, strengthen our national defense, rebuild our critical infrastructure, help our veterans, support our country’s famers and ranchers, and refocus on the many other priorities that have been neglected while we have squandered money on grifters and liars who have taken advantage of our guilelessness and gullibility while harming our nation through word and deed.