Freedom Line Blog

As the 2020 election gets closer and calls for more and more government intervention increase, a handy visual reminder from Heritage that freedom, not intervention, means prosperity:

Freedom = Prosperity

In case you needed reading material for your daily ‘two minutes’ hate’ this month, the Heritage Foundation released today its much-anticipated 2010 Index of Dependence on Government.

It’s not cheerful reading.  From the abstract:

The number of Americans who pay taxes continues to shrink—and the United States is close to the point at which half of the population will not pay taxes for government benefits they receive. In 2009, 64.3 million Americans depended on the government (read: their fellow citizens) for their daily housing, food, and health care. Starting in 2015, the Social Security program will not receive enough taxes to pay all the promised benefits—which will be hard for all job-holders, but devastating for roughly half the American workforce that has no other retirement program. Add in last year’s preposterously named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, spiraling academic grants, flat-out farm socialism, the swelling ranks of Americans who believe themselves entitled to “free” government benefits—and now the government takeover of the nation’s health care system—and the very nature of this country’s republican form of government is called into question. Like they have been doing since 2002, Heritage Foundation policy experts lay out the increasingly gloomy facts. Can Americans pull back from the brink of complete dependence on government?

A great companion piece to Heritage’s ‘Dependence Index’ is the Legatum Institute’s ‘Prosperity Index,’ an equally in-depth look at policies that grow individual wealth instead of destroy it.