Maybe Lyndon Johnson really didn’t say what he was famously accused of having said about his welfare programs. I would hope so; given that if he were pursuing a bribes-for-votes strategy, then he has miserably failed. This is what typically happens when a welfare state discovers the fundamental economic paradox. From Wikipedia we can quickly learn that this problem is as follows: The economic problem is most simply explained by the question: “How do we satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources?”

We can further derive the following lemmas. A demand can only be temporarily satisfied and then perpetually reappears unless the people demanding are trained to handle it themselves. A welfare state produces virtually nothing on its own accord to satisfy any demand, so it has to steal someone else’s wealth or property to fulfill any demand. Finally, we can easily observe that people dependent upon a welfare state never develop the desire or the ability to cope with anything they don’t get made to. Literally anything. If you think I’m kidding, watch the YouTube below.

So how do you give a population that literally demands everything and produces nothing what they want? You steal. The New York Welfare State gives us a recent example.

Due to declining enrollment rates of blacks and Hispanics at the eight prestigious high schools in NYC—among them Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx School of Science—there is a growing push to change the admissions process from one based exclusively on test scores to more “holistic” and subjective standards.

Once a nation’s population sees the government steal to provide for all of their needs, the effect of this upon their personal standards of honesty and integrity is completely and utterly predictable. Berlin University conducted a study to determine how people would behave if they could get away with cheating and tracked where they were from geographically.

The game was simple enough. Each participant was asked to throw a die 40 times and record each roll on a piece of paper. A higher overall tally earned a bigger payoff. Before each roll, players had to commit themselves to write down the number that was on either the top or the bottom side of the die. However, they did not have to tell anyone which side they had chosen, which made it easy to cheat by rolling the die first and then pretending that they had selected the side with the highest number. If they picked the top and then rolled a two, for example, they would have an incentive to claim—falsely—that they had chosen the bottom, which would be a five. Honest participants would be expected to roll ones, twos and threes as often as fours, fives and sixes. But that did not happen: the sheets handed in had a suspiciously large share of high numbers, suggesting many players had cheated.

When compared by geographical area, the study discovered the following sad truth.

.. , those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers of high rolls.

So let’s examine how great a society we get from following the principles of progressivism. People grow degenerate as they have their livelihoods increasingly provided to them for free. The government has to steal from productive people to fund the welfare state. When the people see the government steal, they decide it must be perfectly ok if they steal as well. I mean it’s social justice. So The Great Society makes the people stupid, the government an engine of corruption and the ethical standards of the populace commensurate with the sleazy and disingenuous welfare state pols. What better a way for a nation to slowly commit pointless suicide?