Government, the French economist and parliamentarian Frederic Bastiat wrote two centuries ago, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else. Though there wasn't much of a "social safety net" back then, Bastiat was correct about human selfishness and desire for power and privilege.

Bastiat's old insight is understatement today. According to a recent study by the Economic Innovation Group, a policy research organization in Washington, Americans have never been more dependent on transfer payments from government — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food subsidies, unemployment and disability stipends, and such. The study says transfer payments now constitute 18% of the national income, up from 8% in 1970, $4.3 trillion annually now compared to $70 billion in 1970.

Nevertheless, the current national election campaign suggests that many if not most people still can’t support themselves, not even in Connecticut, supposedly a rich state. Most Democratic candidates here and throughout the country are clamoring for more income supports from government, especially regarding children. A centerpiece of the Democratic campaign is a federal "child tax credit," which would send big monthly checks to households with children.

Connecticut’s only member of Congress facing serious competition, 5th District Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, has joined this clamor with a campaign commercial touting her efforts to "feed our babies."

So why can’t people support their children anymore?

While the question is seldom asked by anyone in authority, the other day U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, addressed it in a newspaper essay. Unfortunately she was dishonest about it, acknowledging one cause of the problem, the recent ruinous inflation in the price of necessities — food, fuel, electricity, and medicine — but blaming it on "price gouging by large corporations." To hear DeLauro tell it, the government's spectacular recent increase in money creation, deficit spending and transfer programs has nothing to do with inflation.

"Price gouging" can occur only in uncompetitive markets, and the United States does have some markets that should be more competitive. But that’s what anti-trust law is for, and recent national administrations, including the one DeLauro supports, have failed to enforce it vigorously. DeLauro and other members of Congress from Connecticut might even be glad about this lack of enforcement, since the state depends heavily on industries that could use more competition, like military contracting, insurance and government itself.

But there is another cause of the inability of people to support their children — their own irresponsibility. Many people have more children than they are prepared to support, though this is the age of virtually free contraception and abortion. It is also the age of self-impoverishment — social promotion in school, childbearing outside marriage, and single-parenting — and the age of government subsidies for self-impoverishment.

Are people even morally obliged to support their own children anymore? Few elected officials and candidates seem to think so.

A century ago Theodore Roosevelt, the country’s most liberal president up to that time, declared that the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. Four decades later another liberal president, John F. Kennedy, told Americans not to ask what their country could do for them but to ask what they could do for their country. How quaint that seems now.

If Roosevelt and Kennedy were around today, surveying the clamor for more transfer payments, might they admit to Bastiat that he was right and they were wrong?

Better to worry

As Connecticut entered its 14 days of early voting, state leaders and journalists declared that every vote counts and noted some recent elections that were decided by a single vote.

Meanwhile, despite the recent election scandals in Bridgeport and Stamford, the country’s admission of millions of illegal immigrants, Connecticut’s functioning as a "sanctuary state," and its failure to maintain accuracy in voter rolls, these same people also have been declaring that no one should worry about voter fraud because it's rare.

Maybe it is rare but it seems likely to become less so.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.