Many of 49% of Americans are Slaves,

while 51% are wastrels responsible for massive government spending they pay no income tax to fund.  Yes, in 2009, the number of Americans not paying income taxes to the federal government became a 51% majority.  For them, it does not matter how wasteful government spending is, because it is not their money.  They can and do ask, "Why should I care what it costs, I do not pay for it."  Obama has succeeded in creating a majority of recipients of his redistributionist theft.  It gets worse, since some of those 49% who pay some income tax, actually do get more in government goodies than the amount they pay in taxes.

For instance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 1,909,000 civilian federal employees in November 2008, excluding the postal employees.  With their generally high salaries and extremely good benefits, they can be said to mostly be receiving more in government payments than they are paying in taxes.  It is interesting to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on total employment in April 2011, but only provides the number of federal employees as recently as November 2008.  Do you suppose they do not want the taxpayer to easily find out how bloated the federal bureaucracy truly is?  On top of this, I have seen numbers for January 2009 civilian federal employees without security clearances reported to be 2,748,978.  The CIA, NSA, and other complete federal agencies were left out of that 2.7 million number.  This number may include the postal employees.  Does the federal government have as much trouble keeping track of how many employees it has as it does of how much land, how many buildings, and how much equipment it has?  I would not be surprised.

Then there are also those many businessmen so cozy with the government who are collecting subsidies and who benefit from mandates, such as those to use ethanol, wind energy, solar energy, and partially electric cars.  There are also crony mercantilists benefiting from many regulations designed to bury their competition, especially that of small businesses, under a mountain of government requirements and paperwork.  These people are often called crony capitalists, but that is a contradiction of terms.  Crony mercantilists have been around as long as there have been governed nation-states, which long predates the day of the capitalists with their philosophy of open markets and freedom of choice.  Capitalism is the manifestation of the equal, sovereign individual right to associate with whom one wants for the purposes of one's choosing.

Just recently, every business in America doing any business with FDA-regulated companies or with FAA and DOD regulated aerospace companies has been hit with a blizzard of quality assurance paperwork and the pressure is mounting for every company to become International Standards Organization (ISO) certified at huge expense both initially and in an on-going way.  This is expensive for large companies and will be the death of many a small company.  The small company that always had to try harder to provide good service or quality products will now be killed in many cases in the name of increased quality.  Ha.  We will see what the monopoly of the few companies that can bear the expense of this extra-governmental regulation required by government agencies will provide in future quality!  Every lab will have calibrated equipment, but will pay no attention to correctly interpreting the data provide to obtain the real properties of the materials investigated.  There will be no quality in the end product analytical report, but every laboratory will be a quality lab because ISO says they are.  As Ayn Rand noted long ago, regulation by government sets up lowest common denominator requirements and no company thereafter has as much pressure as before to exceed those low requirements.  But, many a tired, old, and large company is very happy with such regulations, whether set by the government or by a one-world organization such as ISO.  ISO also serves the function of providing import protection to Europe primarily, but secondarily to the U.S., Canada, and Japan.

If you wonder why it is so hard to reduce the size of government or to reduce its out-of-control spending, this is why.  There are too few people paying taxes and many too many people getting payments, subsidies, and protection from effort.  The many have truly enslaved the productive and wealth-creating few.  But it is these few who create the jobs.  As our society has become most determined to enslave and whip these few, they have responded by laying off many of the employees they can no longer support and by refusing to hire more new employees even as they struggle to increase productivity while robbed of the capital with which to do it.