Oxymoron: Constitutional Welfare State

The Trinitarian U.S. Constitution is pessimistic on human nature, hence the need to share sovereignty through separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, to restrain abusive rulers. (The connection between pessimism on human nature and Trinitarianism is that because corrupt man cannot self-redeem, Christ must be divine to atone for man's sin; and conversely, Christ's deity implies man's depravity, in that only a divine Savior can regenerate man, who cannot self-regenerate.)

Unitarian welfare statism is optimistic on human nature. In this view incentivizing sloth through doles allegedly will not enable self-destructive, anti-social behavior. (The connection between optimism on human nature and Unitarianism is that if perfectible man can self-redeem, there is no need for a divine Christ to atone for man's sin; and conversely, Christ's non-deity would imply man's innate goodness, that man can self-regenerate without a divine Savior. Salvation-by-works is the essence of Phariseeism.)

Consistent with its pessimism on human nature, the U.S. Constitutional Convention's original intent was to deny human sovereignty over the money supply, by rejecting a bid to authorize federal emissions of "bills of credit," i.e., federal fiat paper money. Consistent with its optimism on human nature, welfare statism (confident that virtuous rulers will not abuse their power) requires human sovereignty over the money supply and infinite taxation via monetary inflation to cover its unslakeable deficits.

True to its harmony with Christ, the Personal Word of God, Trinitarian U.S. Constitutionalism jibes with the Bible, the written word of God, whose rule (Deut. 17:17) is that government should not "greatly multiply" the money supply. This is anti-thetical to what Unitarian welfare statism demands, echoing its stark denial of Christ's deity and defiance of God's written word, which says (Ex. 20:15) "Thou shalt not steal." That is exactly what inflation stealthily does to both creditors' and debtors' purchasing power.

Based on obvious original intent, an inflationary governmental monetary policy is unconstitutional. Welfare statism is inherently inflationary, and hence intrinsically unconstitutional. It taxes enterprise and subsidizes dependence. It therefore gets less of the former and more of the latter, raising prices and lowering living standards by penalizing productive consumption while promoting unproductive consumption by newly-created classes of welfare recipients, bureaucrats, and soldiers under arms.

Speaking of soldiers under arms, welfare-state costs dwarf defense spending. But they also drive it, because since 1973 an increasingly-overextended U.S. military, instead of gold, has backed the dollar's monopoly as world reserve currency in international trade against growing challenges by restive nations vexed by its supremacy. Thus though welfare-state and defense budgets supposedly vie for federal resources, they in fact partner to cause and enforce U.S. international inflationary economic imperialism.

"Great Society" welfare-statism began in 1965.

As spending on "anti-poverty" programs increased, the poverty rate stopped declining. The percentage of Americans below the poverty line fell from 30% in 1950 to 18% in 1964, and to 13% in 1968. But although social welfare spending quadrupled during the 1970s, in 1980 13% of Americans were still officially poor – and this did not include those who would be officially poor if federal payments (e.g., AFDC, Supplemental Security Income [SSI]) did not count as part of their income.
Job training programs had little impact on the hardcore unemployed whom they chiefly targeted. Some already-employed workers used these programs to upgrade their skills and get better jobs. But most of the chronically jobless who enrolled in them either dropped out, never got jobs afterward, or (due to poor work habits) soon lost what jobs they got. Meanwhile the U.S. ended silver coinage in 1965, and abandoned the dollar gold standard in international trade in 1971.
From 1965 to 1980, about as many real dollars were spent on federal jobs programs, as on the space program from 1958 to 1969, yet the unemployment rate among black males under 20 years of age rose from 1966 to 1980. The Great Society no longer distinguished between the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor. Instead it blamed "the system" for poverty and granted welfare as a "right," debunking the work ethic. Moral and monetary debasement are related.
Federal spending on education more than tripled in real dollars between 1964 and 1980, but academic achievement gaps among groups changed little. Despite Great Society emphases on "compensatory education," bilingual education, and racial integration, A Nation at Risk found in 1983 that education declined during this period. The mis-education establishment never came to grips with its fundamentally dysfunctional pedagogy in the teaching of reading and math.

OXYMORON: "CONSTITUTIONAL U.S. WELFARE STATE"