Dependency Is Not Prosperity
The biggest danger of a prolonged government shutdown is the mirage of a prosperous nation being shattered. What if the shutdown went on long enough for people to realize that they live not in a prosperous nation, but in a nation of federal dependency?
By most outward measures, the United States appears wealthy beyond precedent. Its gross domestic product exceeds $25 trillion. Its citizens live amid material abundance unimagined by past generations. Yet beneath these impressive aggregates lies a sobering reality: a vast and growing share of both personal and state income originates not from production, but from redistribution.
Nearly one-fifth of all personal income now flows from federal transfer payments: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, and various aid programs. Likewise, one-third of state budgets depend on federal grants. That is to say, both households and governments increasingly subsist not on what they generate, but on what they receive.
This condition, though clothed in the appearance of prosperity, conceals a structural fragility. When a nation’s vitality is mediated through the hand of a central authority, it ceases to be truly prosperous in the classical sense. It becomes a managed economy, one that may appear stable while its creative energies quietly erode.
Are We Truly Productive?
Prosperity is the fruit of production, the creative transformation of resources into value through enterprise, innovation, and labor. Redistribution, by contrast, merely transfers the fruits already produced. The former builds; the latter reallocates.
In a healthy society, redistribution might be a supplement, an allegedly compassionate mechanism to preserve dignity and prevent despair. But when redistribution becomes the primary engine of stability, it displaces production as the center of economic life.
That is the pivot America now faces. The federal government has become not merely a regulator of the economy but its beating heart, the dispenser of income, sustainer of states, and backstop of industries. The balance between market vitality and state dependency has tipped toward the latter. A government shutdown makes this visible: remove the federal flow for even a few days, and entire systems shudder.
Dependency breeds centralization. The more citizens and states rely on Washington, the more Washington governs by default.
Federal grants to states, once exceptional, now shape local policies in education, transportation, and healthcare. What was once a union of laboratories of democracy becomes a network of subsidiaries tethered to federal appropriations.
Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw such a future with chilling precision:
“The sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated rules… it does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people.”
This is not tyranny by force, but dependency by comfort, a “soft despotism” that substitutes bureaucratic provision for personal and civic initiative.
At the individual level, federal payments sustain millions: retirees, the disabled, the unemployed, the poor. This reflects compassion, but also consequence. Each layer of dependency reduces the sphere of self-determination. A people accustomed to receiving rather than creating inevitably lose confidence in their own generative power.
Thomas Jefferson warned that the surest path to servitude is “for the people to become dependent on the government for their subsistence.” He did not mean that assistance was immoral, but that dependency erodes self-rule. For Jefferson, liberty was not merely the absence of restraint, but the presence of capacity, the ability to sustain oneself without submission.
Running In Circles
Federal wealth is not real wealth. It is derivative, drawn from the productive sectors it taxes or the debt it issues. Every grant, every transfer, every subsidy originates from present labor or future obligation. Thus the apparent generosity of federal spending masks a deferred cost, paid either by inflation, taxation, or diminished opportunity.
In this sense, the American economy increasingly resembles a circular system: citizens depend on the government; the government depends on citizens’ taxes and debt markets; and the illusion of prosperity continues so long as confidence holds. It is prosperity by perpetual motion machine, one that consumes independence as its unseen fuel.
True prosperity, rightly understood, is the flourishing of free persons, men and women who possess both the means and the will to shape their own destinies. It cannot be conferred by decree or maintained by subsidy. It arises from creative labor, voluntary exchange, and moral discipline.
A prosperous nation is not one in which citizens are well-fed by the state, but one in which they feed themselves, and in doing so, preserve the dignity of self-reliance and the virtue of stewardship.
Dependency may preserve life; only freedom cultivates vitality.
Will We Continue Downward?
The path back to genuine prosperity is neither purely economic nor purely political; it is moral. It requires a reawakening of civic responsibility, local initiative, and productive independence.
States must recover fiscal autonomy, designing programs suited to their people rather than waiting for Washington’s permission.
Individuals must rediscover the satisfaction of earned provision and the strength that comes from creation, not consumption.
Federal aid should remain a safety net, not a lifestyle. Compassion must coexist with the expectation of capability. The goal of assistance should be to restore independence, not to perpetuate dependence.
A nation cannot be considered truly prosperous when it survives on the circulation of its own dependency. Federal dollars may sustain the machinery of life, but they cannot animate the soul of a free people.
Prosperity without independence is illusion, wealth without vitality, comfort without courage. If America is to remain not merely a rich nation but a great one, it must once again teach its citizens and its states to stand on their own feet, for no republic can endure when it forgets how to walk.
KrisAnneHall.com 2025
