Politics & Power Quote by Neal Boortz

Boortz frames Social Security less as an insurance program than as a political machine, and the sentence is engineered to make that reframing feel obvious. He starts with “main purpose,” a phrase that quietly dismisses the program’s stated rationale (poverty prevention in old age, disability insurance, survivors’ benefits) as PR. Then he switches from policy language to motive language: “redistribute wealth” isn’t a neutral description of progressive benefit formulas; it’s a provocation calibrated to trigger suspicion that someone is taking what you earned and handing it to someone else.

The real payload arrives in the second clause: “to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government.” That’s a claim about intent, not outcome, and it borrows the emotional charge of “dependency” in American political culture: infantilization, loss of autonomy, a citizenry trained to vote for the hand that feeds. Boortz isn’t arguing that Social Security creates reliance because retirement is expensive and wages stagnate; he’s suggesting dependency is the point. The program becomes a moral hazard and a power grab in one.

Context matters: Boortz is a talk-radio libertarian whose brand runs on stripping New Deal-era institutions of their benevolent story and revealing a darker one. The quote performs that reveal. It compresses a decades-long conservative critique into a single accusation: Social Security isn’t a safety net; it’s a lever. Whether or not the claim holds up empirically, it works rhetorically because it recasts a widely popular program as a threat to self-rule, not just to budgets.