Now that McDonald’s has started playing Christmas music, it is time to start thinking about Santa. The second-to-last paragraph of “Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Political Economy” by Robert Higgs offers a seasonally appropriate comparison:

Many Americans now believe many things about their government that are false, and they expect much from the government that the rulers cannot provide. The public at large embraces myths about what the government can do, what it actually does, and how it goes about doing it. Only people enamored of such myths can support, for example, a gigantically expensive health-care “reform” at a time when the present value of the government’s promised future Social Security and Medicare benefits alone amounts to several times the current GDP. (I am disregarding here the interested parties who expect to reap short-run pillage from an intrinsically doomed system.) Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies. This prevailing ideology constitutes probably the most critical obstacle to reductions in the government’s size, scope, and power. Getting rid of this ideology will be diabolically difficult, if possible at all.

The author has a Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins (compared to my meager collection of econ courses taken), but I believe him to be wrong about Social Security and Medicare benefits. As pointed out in my blog postings on While America Aged, Congress has the authority to change the Social Security age of eligibility to 75 or 80 or to adjust Medicare so that anesthesia returns to the good old days of whiskey and a bullet to bite. It is states and local governments that are truly stuck with their pension and health care promises.

For Americans who don’t pay income tax, perhaps the government truly is Santa Claus. According to the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, roughly 47 percent of Americans either pay no tax or a negative tax (i.e., the government sends them money every year through such programs as the Earned Income Tax Credit). So you’d think that any new government spending program would attract at least 47 percent of potential voters. On the other hand, millions of people who do not suffer the scourge of income tax still get hit with assorted other taxes at both the state and federal level.

What am I telling people that I want from Santa this year? World peace, of course (because I want to win the Nobel Prize after Sandra Bullock gets hers). And that I want Barack Obama to become immortal and then to be elected President-for-Life.