Recently the federal debt raced past $17 trillion. To put that in perspective, the U.S. population is currently around 316,941,000, so the debt amounts to nearly $54,000 per person.

Where is the government doing with that money? Government spends over half the federal budget on direct wealth-transfer programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone consume over 40 percent of the budget.

In other words, the government’s dominant activity consists in forcibly seizing wealth from some Americans and giving it to others.

To federal politicians who act on the premise that government should force some Americans to sacrifice for the sake of others, the rights of the Americans being sacrificed—such as their rights to keep and use their own wealth for their own purposes—are irrelevant.

If Americans want to rein in the national debt and thus avoid the catastrophe that will ensue if we do not, we must repudiate the rights-violating programs that give rise such problems—and we must repudiate the morality of sacrifice, which demands such rights violations.

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