The Society Project

“Welfare”… Theft of a Nation

By Christopher Holloman Hansen

Verbicide … the murder of a word or its intentional misuse… was first coined by…  C. S. Lewis, but its dangers have been recognized for millennia. Confucius, circa 500 B. C., is reported to have said:

When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.

… based on the verbicide of the phrase “general welfare”…  The United States Supreme Court in 1937 in HELVERING v. DAVIS, 301 U.S. 619…  turned a Constitution clearly establishing a limited Federal government into… tyranny limited only by congressional interpretation of what was “necessary and proper” for the establishment of the “general welfare” … with “modern” definitions.

Senator Sam Ervin, of Watergate hearing fame, understood this verbicide and its possible effects on law and the Constitution. He said:

Judaical verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. understood the dangers of verbicide. He said:

Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide - that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life - are alike forbidden.

Men of legal understanding have long understood that the meaning of words in the law must be interpreted, as the authors of the law understood the words.

In a letter to Henry Lee, James Madison wrote:

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution… What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in the modern sense.

In a letter to William Johnson, Thomas Jefferson echoed Madison’s sentiments:

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

The Founding Fathers understood the importance of language. Single words, their placement within the Constitution and even punctuation were debated. They also understood that the meanings of words could change or be maliciously and intentionally misinterpreted.

When modern Americans hear the word “welfare” most think of… improvement of the welfare of disadvantaged social groups” and “receiving public welfare benefits”.

That definition of “welfare” would have been unknown in 1776…  let’s take a look at the meaning of “welfare” and “general welfare” as the Founding Fathers understood them and their metamorphosis and verbicide.

“Welfare” is defined in Noah Webster’s original 1828 Dictionary as:

WEL’FARE, noun [well and fare, a good going; German wohlfahrt; Dutch welvaart; Swedish valfart; Danish velfoerd.]

1. Exemption from misfortune, sickness, calamity or evil; the enjoyment of health and the common blessings of life; prosperity; happiness; applied to persons.
2. Exemption from any unusual evil or calamity; the enjoyment of peace and prosperity, or the ordinary blessings of society and civil government; applied to States.

Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary comprised of the 1864, 1879 and 1884 issues updated and revised and published in 1904 and the Revised 1913 edition defines “welfare” with no obvious substantial change in its meaning except that the distinction between “applied to persons” and “applied to states” has been removed. This is an important distinction as both of the Constitution’s “general Welfare” clauses are only “applied to states” and not to “persons”.  The definitions of welfare is as follows:

1904 edition:

Welfare, n. [Well + fare to go, to proceed, to happen.] Well-doing or well being in any respect; the enjoyment of health and the common blessings of life; exemption from any evil or calamity; prosperity; happiness.

Webster’s 1913 Revised Unabridged Dictionary:

Wel”fare’, n. [Well + fare to go, to proceed, to happen.] Well-doing or well being in any respect; the enjoyment of health and the common blessings of life; exemption from any evil or calamity; prosperity; happiness.

Government doles such, as Social Security and Food Stamps were not even a part of the “welfare” definition. The term “Welfare work” is reported as first being mentioned in 1903 in Review of Reviews, stating:

The term “industrial betterment”, or “welfare work,” is used in a wider sense to include all of those services which an employer may render to his work people over and above the payment of wages. It has even been used to include the provisions of homes for employees, kindergartens, schoolhouses [etc.]

Even this definition was not about government dole but private employment benefits.

Then in 1904 Century Magazine said:

The Welfare worker of a large retail establishment.

This Century Magazine quote is recognized in Webster’s 9th and 10th Collegiate Dictionaries:

Welfare adj. (1904) 1: Of, relating to, or concerned with welfare and esp. with improvement of the welfare of disadvantaged social groups {~ legislation}

2: Receiving public welfare benefits {~ mothers}

And in Webster’s 10th Collegiate Dictionary:

welfare adj. (1904) 1:of, relating to, or concerned with welfare and esp. with improvement of the welfare of disadvantaged social groups {~legislation}.

2: receiving public welfare benefits {~families}.

Note again the subtle change from just mother’s to families. The lie just grows and grows but only in very small almost imperceptible steps. It is also interesting to note that “welfare” has become an adjective. It had historically been a noun.

Franklin D. Roosevelt understood all of the above. He was a master of politics. He said:

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, it was planned that way.

It was Roosevelt who, more than any other man in American history, used this verbicide so effectively to bypass the Constitution (he was sworn to uphold) and usurp authority by increasing federal power without properly amending the Constitution. President Washington warned us in his Farewell Address that such usurpation is the customary weapon to destroy free governments:

If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

Let us look into the very act of usurpation as seen in HELVERING v. DAVIS, 301 U.S. 619 USSC (1937).

The crash of 1929 was an intentionally created depression following the alleged adoption of the income tax and the anti-constitutional Federal Reserve. This is a demonstration of a manipulated power grab. First they claim there is a Constitutional question. Then they take unemployment from an individual problem and made it “general.” Then they recognized that since this same problem, which now became general, is similar to the problems of old age and disability that Congress has the right to tax one segment to the population and give it to another because this will benefit the “general welfare.” And just like that America became a Socialist State. Hereditary bondage was imposed. The Constitution became a “worthless scrap of paper” and Liberty was essentially lost because the World War II generation, unlike the Founding Fathers, were more concerned with their own temporary security than with the liberty of future generations.

Here is what the court said:

The purge of nation-wide calamity that began in 1929 has taught us many lessons. Not the least is the solidarity of interests that may once have seemed to be divided. …Spreading from state to state, unemployment is an ill not particular but general, which may be checked, if Congress so determines, by the resources of the nation. If this can have been doubtful until now, our ruling today in the case of the Steward Machine Co., supra, has set the doubt at rest. But the ill is all one or at least not greatly different whether men are thrown out of work because there is no longer work to do or because the disabilities of age make them incapable of doing it. Rescue becomes necessary irrespective of the cause. The hope behind this statute is to save men and women from the rigors of the poor house as well as from the haunting fear that such a lot awaits them when journey’s end is near.

When money is spent to promote the general welfare, the concept of welfare or the opposite is shaped by Congress, not the states. So the concept be not arbitrary, the locality must yield.

They changed the original meaning of welfare and established, what would have been unimaginable to the Founding Fathers, a Welfare State, and then encroached on State’s rights all in two short rulings on the same day. (USSC May 24, 1937: Steward Machine Co., supra and Helvering v. Davis)

The following Court stated clearly what the Congress; the usurper President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a traitorous Supreme Court did concerning welfare:

State vs. Sutton, 63 Minn. 147, 65 NW 262, 30 L.R.A. 630 Am. St. 459: “When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the Constitution, a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it.” (See 16 Ma. Jur. 2d 177, 178)

The Supreme Court rejected the words of Jefferson, Madison, Noah Webster, Adams and other Founding Fathers in creating the “absurdity” (see Madison) and a fraud of the Welfare State. President Washington also warned us of such innovations:

Toward the preservation of your government and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.

Abraham Lincoln also understood what could happen if the court became tyrannical:

If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court… the people have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Since the passage of the “Welfare laws” the Federal Government has been in constant violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution because they have encroached upon a responsibility and jurisdiction of religion and family – Charity.

[Note: Church refers also to synagogues and other Religious insitutions].

Today we often hear about how religion must stay out of government and that the separation of church and state must be absolute… The lie …becomes obvious with even a cursory reading of the first four presidents’ inaugural addresses. The restriction was never upon the involvement of religious people, nor the abandonment of morality and virtue but was to keep the government from forming a national religion.

In fact, the federal government has spawned its own secular humanist religion by substituting the theory of evolution [The universe came about merely by chance without a Creator or Design]; and using, taxed financed, government school buildings as churches [of Secular Humanism]; and paying its clergy, the government school teachers, to preach this dogma: The federal government has clearly violated the separation of church and state. Only the doctrines of the Statist Religion…are preached in the Government Church indoctrination centers euphemistically verbicided as “public schools.”  …prayers, Christmas and Easter celebrations, the Ten Commandments, [Judeo-]Christian morality and virtue have been expatriated from the secular humanist “education” rites… [and] the…  Bible… religiously excluded from the government schools.

…voluntary “Charity” is one of the major doctrines of [Judaism and] Christianity… the federal government encroached upon…traditionally religious functions.

Education [too] was one major function of [Judaism and] Christianity.  Harvard and Yale were originally divinity schools [and taught Hebrew].  Morality and religion were to be taught in schools… Article III. of the Northwest Ordinance says:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged…

Free government schools along with the redistribution of wealth are required in the Communist Manifesto.

Government has now infringed upon two of the most important historical duties of…  Churches… charity and education… The Churches have their duties and the governments have their duties, and if either entity encroaches upon the others duties then the First Amendment has been violated. Congress has violated the separation doctrine by stealing the domain and duty of the. .. Churches.

Christianity [and Judaism, which was the Religion of the first Christians and, upon which Christianity is founded] is the religion of the United States of America. Without it, America will lose its liberty and its republican government. Noah Webster said it unequivocally:

If there is a possibility of founding a perfectly free government, and giving it permanent duration, it must be raised upon the pure maxims, and supported by the undecaying practice, of that religion, which breathes “peace on earth, and good will to men.” That religion is perfectly republican… The universal prevalence of that religion, in its true spirit, would banish tyranny from the earth.  Yet this religion has been perverted, and in many countries, made the basis of a system of ecclesiastical domination, which has enslaved the minds of men, as political power had before enslaved their bodies. To correct these evils, a set of fanatical reformers, called philosophers, charging that oppression to the religion itself, which sprung only from its abuses, have boldly denied the sacred origin of Christianity, and attempted to extirpate its doctrines and institutions. Strange, indeed, that the zealous advocates of a republican government, should wage an inveterate war against the only system of religious principles, compatible with rational freedom, and calculated to maintain a republican Constitution!

The care of the poor and needy is the obligation of churches and families; for it must be a voluntary act or it becomes tyranny.