What if government officials wrote novels as their primary work? If they followed the pattern they use when taxing the people and allocating that money to projects, how would they go about writing 300,000+ word fiction? They would copy-n-paste; they would plagiarize.
Our elected officials do not produce anything, not like we do. We earn money through our labor in the market. We the people produce raw materials, manufactured goods, and services in competition with each other in order to win each other’s dollars. We make our living by taking risks, developing our skills, and inviting each other to trust the quality of our work. Government officials don’t, generally speaking. Yes, the government does provide some essentials services, like a national military and the creation and enforcement of essential laws. But today’s politicians ask us to turn to them for more and more, and many of us seem to think it’s a right, noble, and virtuous for them to take what is produced from those we don’t like in order to give to us or at least those we do like.
Isn’t that the same as a writer taking from other novels to make up his own? Isn’t it close to a hack copying another work, changing the names, and altering the ending by copying the last chapter from third novel, then claiming it all as his own? That’s what government subsidies do. That what many government programs are. They take what our neighbors have produced (by force of law through taxes) and give it other neighbors and themselves. I suppose many artists support this because they believe they are entitled to their neighbor’s money. They are jealous of millionaire athletes and want the government to make them millionaires too. Perhaps if they would think of taxation as plagiarism, they would resist calling for more of it.
