Politics & Power Quote by Neal Boortz

Boortz’s line is built like a trapdoor: it turns a messy, century-long argument about taxation and the welfare state into a simple moral drama with clear heroes and villains. “Principal purpose” does the heavy lifting, flattening a sprawling coalition into a single motive, as if party platforms were confessionals and not patchwork compromises. It’s not analysis so much as prosecutorial framing.

The sentence works because it hijacks the language of earned virtue. “People who earn it” isn’t just descriptive; it’s a badge of legitimacy, implying discipline, productivity, even patriotism. The receiving group is defined only by negation, “people who do not,” which quietly erases retirees on Social Security, the disabled, students with grants, farm-subsidy recipients, disaster victims, and the employed who still need benefits. That omission is the subtext: if you narrow the recipient category to an imagined freeloader, redistribution stops being policy and becomes theft.

The phrase “use the force of government” is libertarian code. It’s meant to make taxation feel like coercion first and civic obligation never, pulling the listener toward a pre-political intuition: taking is wrong, therefore the taker is illegitimate. In the late-20th-century talk radio ecosystem Boortz came out of, this wasn’t a stray provocation; it was a format. Outrage needs a clean enemy, and “the Democratic Party” becomes a stand-in for bureaucracy, elites, and cultural resentment. The line’s intent is less to persuade skeptics than to harden an identity: taxpayer as victim, government as mugger, politics as self-defense.