These highlights are from the Kindle version of Plunder and Deceit by Mark Levin. You can find more book highlights here.

The ruling generation’s governing policies are already forecast to diminish the quality of life of future generations. Among other things, witness the massive welfare and entitlement state, which is concurrently expanding and imploding, and the brazen abandonment of constitutional firewalls and governing limitations.

Many in the ruling generation have themselves become entrapped in economically unsustainable governmental schemes in which they are beneficiaries of and reliant on public programs, such as unfunded entitlements, to which they have contributed significantly into supposed “trust funds” and around which they have organized their retirement years.

The federal government makes, executes, and adjudicates the laws. It even determines the extent to which it will comply with the Constitution, which was established in the first place to prevent governmental arrogation.

As a general and logical matter, younger people’s dearth of life experiences and their quixotic idealism make them especially vulnerable to simplistic appeals and emotional manipulation for utopia’s grandiosity and social causes, which are proclaimed achievable only through top-down governmental designs and social engineering and, concurrently, the detachment from and deconstruction of societal traditions, customs, and values, for which they have little or modest conception and investment. Consequently, while in the main and abstractly the rising generation may be distrustful of authority and people, younger people are also especially susceptible to seduction by demagogic politicians, propagandizing academics, charismatic cultural idols, and other authority and popular figures propounding splendid notions of aggressive government activism for and through such corresponding militant causes as “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “income equality,” and other corollaries of radical egalitarianism.

The erosion of individual sovereignty, free will, and self-sufficiency necessarily give way to dependence, conformity, and finally tyranny.

The immunization of formal education from parental and community input is a monumentally disastrous event. Professor Bruce Thornton of California State University observes that the project is deceitful and insidious: “The founding of the United States . . . was not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of wealthy white property-owners. The civil war wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic competition between the industrial north and the plantation south. The settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a civilization in a wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources were stolen to serve capitalist exploitation. Inherent in this sort of history were the assumptions of Marxist economic determinism and the primacy of material causes over the camouflage of ideals and principles.”

In fact, Thornton’s point about the perversion of formal education as a format for class warfare proselytizing is the modern American version of a central theme in The Communist Manifesto. Its authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, argued: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

By cultivating agitation and balkanization almost nothing about the civil society is said to be true, right, or lasting and, therefore, worth preserving and perpetuating. Instead, much uproar is generated in the quest for utopian abstractions and societal transformation—the fundamental cause around which younger people have been encouraged and trained to rally, to their detriment and the jeopardy of subsequent generations, and to the benefit of the statist.

The ruling generation, upon sober reflection, must stir itself to action in order to untangle the web of societal and generational conflicts produced by the statists’ endless and insidious social engineering and encroachment, even though it requires some level of economic self-sacrifice and partial withdrawal from governmental entitlements and subsidies.

George Mason University economics professor Dr. Walter Williams rightly describes the underlying pathology driving the nation to economic and financial ruin as a moral problem: “We’ve become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that real problem.”1 As Williams states, nearly 75 percent of today’s federal spending “can be described as Congress taking the earnings of one American to give to another through thousands of handout programs, such as farm subsidies, business bailouts and welfare.”

The nation’s fiscal operating debt was already $10.6 trillion on the day President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. By the end of January 2012, however, the fiscal operating debt had increased 44.5 percent to $15.4 trillion. As of April 12, 2015, the fiscal operating debt was $18.152 trillion—a 71 percent increase in less than six and one half years.4 Each man, woman, and child in this country’s share of the national debt has grown from $33,220 at the beginning of the Obama presidency to more than $56,900 today.

Ever increasing federal spending exacerbates the national debt problem. For most of the past forty years federal spending has averaged 20.5 percent of GDP.21 But in Obama’s first year in office, federal spending spiked to 24.4 percent of GDP—the highest level since World War II.22 In both 2010 and 2011, expenditures were 23.4 percent of GDP.23 Even with sequestration cuts and follow-on budget deals, spending was 22 percent of GDP in 2012 and nearly 21 percent of GDP in 2013.24 CBO projects spending levels to increase to 26 percent of GDP by 2039.25 This is an immense increase in federal spending. It is attributable to two primary components: federal entitlement spending and debt financing. They are said to be “permanent” fixtures in the budget, which means both are supposedly beyond the reach of Congress’s annual budget process.

Over the next ten years there will be a 38 percent increase in the number of people over sixty-five years of age and entitled to receive Social Security benefits.32 By 2039, CBO reports, there will be an 82 percent increase in the number of those who are over sixty-five years of age.

In the 2014 tax year, the top 20 percent of earners paid 84 percent of individual federal income taxes. Indeed, the top 1 percent of earners paid nearly half of the federal income tax. The bottom 40 percent of earners paid no federal income taxes. Even more, they receive federal government subsidies, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Social Security provides benefits through two major programs—Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI).5 Note the use of the word “insurance.” It is a fiction, about which I will elaborate later. The OASI program provides payments to retirees and, in certain circumstances, to their dependents; DI provides payments to people who are disabled and presumably cannot work. OASI and DI have separate “trust funds.” But for simplicity’s sake they are usually considered together when their financial viability is analyzed.

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.

Younger people do not have powerful organizations lobbying the federal government on their behalf against current and future profligate spending and borrowing. Conversely, the American Association of Retired People (AARP) is an extremely powerful and influential presence on Capitol Hill, relentlessly pressuring Congress for expanded government subsidies for the rising generation and against most serious efforts to reform Social Security and Medicare.

At the heart of the problem is the ruse that Social Security is an insurance program, making an honest national discussion about it extremely difficult. In truth, in no legal, ethical, or rational sense are there actually trust funds or individual trust accounts. Most workers pay into the system each month or bimonthly. In turn, those tax proceeds are used to pay current Social Security beneficiaries. Therefore, it differs fundamentally from an individual, directly funded insurance policy or pension fund account like a 401(k), where a person contributes to a specific account over time and that money is invested just for the beneficiary’s future.

If any private investment firm or insurance company conducted itself this way, it would risk prosecution for conducting an unlawful Ponzi scheme. And today, younger workers are compelled to “contribute” payroll taxes into a system that benefits current retirees and will not exist, at least not as promised, when they reach retirement age.

The federal government is deeply in debt; the largest federal program, Social Security, is hemorrhaging money; the national birthrate does not provide enough working people from whom money can be transferred to subsidize beneficiaries; and most individuals do not have enough personal savings to get them through severe economic times.

The key problem in America is the increasingly centralized role of government in the provision of health-care services, which does, in fact, become administratively unmanageable and financially unsustainable over time. Top-down command-and-control decision-making, combined with political and social engineering and redistributive subsidies, destroy the application of genuine insurance practices; distort and eventually contract the marketplace; hugely inflate costs; generate widespread economic inefficiencies, unpredictability, and scarcity; and, severely diminish the quality of health-care services and their availability to countless patients.

Medicare’s financial condition is even worse than Social Security’s, as its expenses are growing at a faster rate. Nonetheless, in 2010 the federal government’s role in health care hugely expanded in depth and scope with the adoption of the mammoth Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. One indication of the size of this new program is that the original statute was well over two thousand pages in length. By 2013, tens of thousands of pages of related regulations were issued, totaling almost 11,600,000 words.

State budgets are now swamped by health-care spending, in particular Medicaid. Medicaid consumes almost 26 percent of total state expenditures. It is administered by the states with partial financial support from the federal government.8 One of the major provisions of Obamacare was an expansion of Medicaid, in which states were enticed with initial federal subsidies to cover even more individuals.

The CBO has declared that the size and growth of the federal debt, most of which is owing to unfunded entitlement liabilities—especially Medicare and Social Security—is a threat to the future viability of the nation.

Medicare was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. He described it as another insurance system: “Through this new law . . . every citizen will be able, in his productive years when he is earning, to insure himself against the ravages of illness in his old age.”

The history of Medicare is similar to that of Social Security. It was first touted as an insurance system, but it never was. And it has grown into a centralized, bureaucratic octopus with tentacles reaching in every direction.

The Medicare design was political in nature and could never work as a rational economic model. Like Social Security, today it is simultaneously expanding and imploding.

The federal government created an incredibly complex standardized payment scheme—the Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS). This system sought to assign a numerical value to the multitude of medical services.

The impracticability of Medicare’s centralized management and archaic decision-making practices also significantly impairs the broader private sector.

Another outcome from government’s omnipresence in the health-care system is vast levels of fraud, waste, and abuse. On June 25, 2014, the General Accountability Office (GAO) reported: “We have designated Medicare as a high-risk program since 1990, in part because we found the program’s size and complexity make it vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse. Although there have been convictions for multimillion-dollar schemes that defrauded the Medicare program, the extent of the problem is unknown. There are no reliable estimates of the extent of fraud in the Medicare program or for the health care industry as a whole

The AMA developed Current Procedural Technology (CPT) codes in the 1960s, which assign a number for every service a doctor or facility provides as a way to introduce uniformity in medical records. There are thousands of such codes, which are updated each year. Now these codes have spawned more codes.

There is also an outpatient code system for diagnoses and disorders—International Classification of Diseases, 9th revision, Clinical Modification or ICD-9-CM codes. Health-care providers are required to use all these codes on claims for reimbursement from Medicare and private insurers.

The federal government is about to require a switch from ICD-9, which has 13,000 codes, to ICD-10, which has 68,000 codes.27 In the new system, there are separate codes for injuries sustained while “sewing, ironing, playing a brass instrument, crocheting, doing handicrafts, or knitting” or injuries caused by a bird, duck, macaw, parrot, goose, or turkey.

In 2010 a Democratic Congress passed, and Obama signed, the most dramatic expansion of federal control over health care since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid nearly fifty years earlier—Obamacare.

The federal government now determines who insurance companies must cover and what benefits they must offer. It prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to people who are already ill or charging higher premiums for those who have greater risk factors.

Obamacare’s advocates also insisted that if passed it would help contain costs. But the experience of Medicare shows otherwise. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist Amy Finkelstein studied the early effects of Medicare on health-care costs and determined that by 1970, within only a few years of its initial passage, it caused a 37 percent increase in hospital spending.

There is also no doubt that major market-oriented reforms and overhauls are required immediately to address unsustainable federal health-care entitlements and avoid the devastating economic and societal consequences awaiting younger people and future generations from decades of extravagance, political manipulation, and rampant bureaucratic intervention in the private health-care system. But rather than disentangle from the federal Leviathan, the recent imposition of Obamacare demonstrates that ideology trumps rationality and the statists’ impulse for even more coercive and disastrous designs are never quenched.

As the late philosopher, economist, and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom, “The state should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to them.

The more the state ‘plans,’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international organization affiliated with the OECD that periodically administers standardized proficiency tests to fourth graders and fifteen-year-olds in schools in sixty-five countries.

The standardized Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) for 2013 paint an equally grim picture. Only 43 percent of the 1.66 million students who took the test scored high enough to be classified as “college ready.”

In math literacy, only 9 percent of American fifteen-year olds finished in the top ranks of proficiency (level 5 or above, out of six levels). This is a lower percentage of top performers than their opposite numbers in 27 countries. It is also a higher share than students in 22 nations, roughly equivalent to those in 13 more nations, and lower than the average score developed by the OECD of 13 percent of students in the top-performing category.

In plain English, the immense investment of tax dollars in a vast government-run educational infrastructure is buying young people a poor education. The data demonstrate there is no overall correlation between the dramatic spending increases in public education during the last several decades and academic achievement. Indeed, in 2014, Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, examined this precise point.

Since the 1960s the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have become enormously powerful political forces, aligning almost exclusively with the Democratic Party.

While there are undoubtedly many excellent teachers in school districts throughout the nation, the NEA and AFT have aggressively opposed serious and enforceable standards of merit and competency for their members, making accountability in the classroom nearly impossible, while steadfastly defending tenure and poorly performing teachers.17 The late, longtime president of the AFT, Albert Shanker, once admitted that “In our system, we have a large number of teachers who have not reached even very low levels of literacy and numeracy.”

In 1963–64, the average tuition, room and board, and fees for a four-year institution—public, private, or for-profit—was $1,248. In 2013, the figure was $20,234.

In addition to the problem of teacher competency there is the malignancy of statist-driven political conformity, ideological indoctrination, social engineering, and academic experimentation that have suffused public schools with such agendas as multiculturalism, global warming, and the distortion of American history, among other things.

This wave of immigration was triggered by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which introduced a system of chain migration—that is, awarding preferences to family members of citizens and resident aliens. This was a radical departure from past immigration policy. For the first time, the law empowered immigrants in the United States to elicit further immigration into the country through family reunification. The late author Theodore White wrote that “the Immigration Act of 1965 changed all previous patterns, and in so doing, probably changed the future of America.

Despite America’s mediocre education system, the evidence demonstrates that enough college students in the STEM disciplines are graduating to fill the market’s demand. A thorough analysis by scholars Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell from the Economic Policy Institute found that “for every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.”

The Census Bureau reports that “74 percent of those who have a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering and math—commonly referred to as STEM—are not employed in STEM occupations.”

Employment as a teen and young adult is particularly important and has a “wide array of private and social economic and educational benefits.”39 High unemployment among these younger people (like high unemployment generally) “reduces the volume of labor inputs into the production process and the level of real output of the U.S. economy.”40 Without a job, younger people lose the opportunity to gain experience and become more valuable for higher-skilled jobs, which they may seek in the future. In fact, the earnings of teens and younger adults are “used to generate additional consumption expenditures on goods and services, thereby raising aggregate demand throughout the economy and the level of employment of other adult workers.”

The Heritage Foundation’s findings underscore the problem. It reports that “On average, unlawful immigrant households received $24,721 per household in government benefits and services in FY 2010. This figure includes direct benefits, means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services received by the household but excludes the cost of public goods, interest on the government debt, and other payments for prior government functions. By contrast, unlawful immigrant households on average paid only $10,334 in taxes. Thus, unlawful immigrant households received $2.40 in benefits and services for each dollar paid in taxes.”60 “All unlawful immigrant households together [in 2010] received $93.7 billion per year in government benefits and services and paid $39.2 billion, yielding an aggregate annual deficit of $54.5 billion.”

After analyzing current census data, CIS reports that legal and illegal immigration will reach an astounding 51 million in the next eight years, which represents 82 percent of the population growth in America, meaning that the immigrant population is growing four times faster than the native-born population.

Like most dogmatists, the degrowthers are impatient. The revolution is now and change must be immediate. Thus, the degrowthers’ agenda is built around hysterical doomsday predictions of environmental armageddon, which can only be avoided by the imposition of their severe, ideologically driven agenda.

Before the Industrial Revolution, for many centuries mankind’s condition experienced little improvement. As University of California historian and economics professor Dr. Gregory Clark explains, “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gathers; thirty to thirty-five years. Stature, a measure of both the quality of diet and children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800.”

Dr. Patrick Moore, a top ecologist and cofounder of Greenpeace, is among many experts who have insisted that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.” Dr. Moore is not alone. Some thirty thousand other experts agree with him.

The minimum wage, and constant demands for its increase, is said to be compassionate. But the concrete evidence shows it is a job killer, especially for low- or unskilled workers in general, and younger people in particular.

Forcing employers to pay more for unskilled or less-skilled workers, many of whom are younger, on top of the other statist economic and social policies, discourages employee retention and hiring.

Workers under age twenty-five compose approximately 20 percent of the total workforce, but they make up approximately half of those who earn the federal minimum wage.32 About 20 percent of employed teenagers earn the minimum wage, compared with 3 percent of workers over the age of twenty-five.

The effects of the imposition of a minimum wage on the economy have been evaluated by economists using different types of models. (The term “model” refers to a method for applying and analyzing given data.) First among these models is the basic competitive (or neoclassical) model, which demonstrates that when the government establishes a minimum wage above the market-driven wage, it increases a business’s cost of production and induces two economy-wide effects. In their book Minimum Wages, University of California economics professor Dr. David Neumark and Federal Reserve policy expert William L. Wascher explain that “First, the price of the output rises and the demand for it falls, leading to a decline in production (the ‘scale effect’).” Next, “the higher wage rate causes [businesses] to substitute capital for labor in the production process (the ‘substitution effect’). As a result, the demand for labor falls.” This negative demand for labor “applies unambiguously only to less-skilled workers whose wages are directly raised by the minimum wage.”

Economists Neumark and Wascher evaluated decades of studies analyzing the efficacy of the minimum wage and the various models used to analyze their economic effects. They concluded that “Based on the evidence from our nearly two decades of research on minimum wages, coupled with the evidence accumulated from an impressive body of research conducted by others, we find it very difficult to see a good economic rationale for continuing to seek a higher minimum wage.” Numerous economic studies conducted over decades are “fairly unambiguous—minimum wages reduce employment of low skilled workers.”

A recent study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) underscores the findings of Neumark and Wascher. After examining the effects of raising the minimum wage, the CBO concludes that for those who keep their jobs, wages would obviously increase, however, “jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated, the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially, and the share of low-wage workers who were employed would probably fall slightly.” Indeed, increasing the minimum wage would “reduce total employment by 500,000 workers.”

It should now be obvious that the rising generation, particularly teenagers and young adults, is most adversely harmed by increases in the minimum wage, the consequences of which include pervasive unemployment and the lack of important job experience, affecting their future employment prospects and potential for success.

China has embarked on a vigorous military and economic program designed to spread its influence regionally and worldwide. From its bordering neighbors and the African continent to South and Central America, China is investing tens of billions of dollars in nation-building efforts obviously designed to increase its—and decrease American—influence. China is also the principal supporter of oppressive regimes in North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela. And China is among the countries that have provided Iran with vital assistance in the development of its nuclear program.

From its bordering neighbors and the African continent to South and Central America, China is investing tens of billions of dollars in nation-building efforts obviously designed to increase its—and decrease American—influence. China is also the principal supporter of oppressive regimes like North Korea.

Iran’s designs on the Middle East and beyond are vast and growing. It is building “an arc of power” or “Shia crescent” stretching from Lebanon to Syria, Iraq to Yemen, and throughout other countries and territories by funding and arming terrorist surrogates.

Beyond its military threat, Iran (in partnership with the Hezbollah terrorist organization) and other countries, such as Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Somalia, and others, sponsor, tolerate, or ineffectively oppose terrorist organizations training or operating within their borders.

Pew reports that a “significant minority (21 percent) of Muslim Americans say that there is a great deal (6 percent) or a fair amount (15 percent) of support for extremism in the Muslim American community” and it is on the rise. Furthermore, nearly half of American Muslims say that Muslim leaders in the United States are not doing enough to speak out against Islamic extremism.

The Department of Defense (DOD) alone uses fifteen thousand networks and has 7 million computing devices in service, which has led the DOD to “formally recognize cyberspace for what it is—a domain similar to land, sea, air and space,” according to former deputy secretary of defense William Lynn. Lynn also noted that more than one hundred foreign intelligence agencies have tried to access American networks.

On July 17, 1980, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Ronald Reagan said, in part: “We are not a warlike people. Quite the opposite. We always seek to live in peace. We resort to force infrequently and with great reluctance—and only after we have determined that it is absolutely necessary. We are awed—and rightly so—by the forces of destruction at loose in the world in this nuclear era. But neither can we be naive or foolish. Four times in my lifetime America has gone to war, bleeding the lives of its young men into the sands of beachheads, the fields of Europe, and the jungles and rice paddies of Asia. We know only too well that war comes not when the forces of freedom are strong, but when they are weak. It is then that tyrants are tempted. We simply cannot learn these lessons the hard way again without risking our destruction.”

“The great mass of human calamities, in all ages, has been the result of bad government, or ill adjusted government; of a capricious exercise of power, a fluctuating public policy, a degrading tyranny, or a desolating ambition.” The fundamental objects of all free governments, Story declared, are “the protection and preservation of personal rights, the private property, and the public liberties of the whole people. Without accomplishing these ends, the government may, indeed, be called free, but it is a mere mockery, and a vain, fantastic shadow.” Story continued, “Life, liberty, and property stand upon equal grounds in the just estimate of freemen; and one becomes almost worthless without the security of the others. How, then, are these rights to be established and preserved? The answer is, by constitutions of government, wisely framed and vigilantly enforced; by laws and institutions, deliberately examined and steadfastly administered.”

The Framers established a governmental system that was at once federal, representative, and constitutional. It incorporated the tradition of state sovereignty, upon which the earlier Articles of Confederation had been almost exclusively based, with the necessity of national governance to encourage commerce and trade and guarantee the nation’s security and defense.

When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.” This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in The Communist Manifesto, declared: “In bourgeois society . . . the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.” This view is shared by contemporary statists, including the current occupants of the White House. On May 14, 2008, the future First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, while campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, proclaimed: “We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history. We’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” On October 30, 2008, when the polls showed him the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election, Barack Obama shouted during a campaign stop days before the vote: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Each year the executive branch is engaged in frenzied regulatory activity with virtually no oversight by Congress or input from the public. In 2014 alone, the executive branch issued 3,541 regulations,20 comprising 79,066 pages of the Federal Register, the yearly compilation of federal regulations. And these thousands of pages of regulations are piled on top of tens of thousands of pages of regulations from prior years.

In immigration-related matters, Obama has nullified core parts of existing law and substituted for them his own political preferences through unchecked “executive action.” After instituting a string of executive directives altering existing immigration law, and insisting that if Congress did not act to adopt his immigration agenda he would act on his own, on November 20, 2014, just days after the 2014 midterm elections in which the Democratic Party lost the Senate, Obama took his most far-reaching immigration-related executive action. Among other things, he ordered the deferral of deportation (“deferred action”) of several million illegal aliens, assigning them temporary legal status, and instituted scores of additional immigration policy changes. The temporary legal status results in formerly illegal immigrants receiving extensive taxpayer-subsidized benefits from such programs as Social Security, Medicare, earned income tax credits, and so on. Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, estimates the lifetime costs of these benefits to the United States Treasury at $1.3 trillion.

The consolidation of power, a mortal threat to the individual and liberty, is now the primary object of government.

Immigration policy must no longer focus almost exclusively on the perceived or real interests of the alien, including alien children, while ignoring the economic, cultural, and societal consequences for America’s youth and future generations from uninterrupted waves of unassimilated illegal and legal immigration mostly from Third World countries. Ethnic pandering may improve the political lot of statist politicians looking for electoral advantage, it may serve the interests of self-appointed leaders of ethnic groups promoting balkanization and demographic advantage, and it may help incompetent foreign governments that prefer exporting their next generation to the United States rather than reforming their regimes and economic systems, but it certainly is not pursued in the best interests of America’s children and future generations, whose well-being is rarely considered in the making of these decisions.

Of course, future generations do not vote in present-day elections. Burdening them with unimaginable debt has no contemporary political downside. These programs are actually worse than a Ponzi scheme, as the rising generation and its progeny are legally compelled to serve as a cash cow for as long as they can be milked.

Preserving peace means being prepared for war. That is history’s lesson.

It is, after all, far easier for today’s statists to dole out money not yet earned by future generations not yet born and be lauded as compassionate, thereby reaping media plaudits and political benefits for generational wealth redistribution, than to be accused of denying subsidies and programs to a growing list of “worthy” and needy recipients and suffer the media and political backlash. Nonetheless, the governing generation’s self-deception (or worse) does not and will not avert the inflating debt bubble, which will eventually burst and flatten the society, turning promises of utopia into the reality of dystopia for future generations.

The Constitution is the bedrock on which the nation was built. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.”