Sen. Mitt Romney, Republican In Name Only as he is, just proposed a piece of legislation that would gift parents with children, depending on ages, between $250 and $350 per month and up to $4,200 per year.

How is that not socialist?

Better yet, the bigger question: Why should taxpayers pay for parents to have kids?

Having children is a choice.

Unless a crime has been committed, the decision to bear children or not bear children is just that — a choice.

Even if the child is unplanned — the events leading to the unplanned are all choices.

With choice comes accountability. With the decision-making process comes personal responsibility. With freedom comes consequences.

Make the wrong choice, and pay for the wrong choice. That’s how individual accountability works; that’s how a free society operates. Government steps back and allows individuals the freedom to choose; but when individuals choose wrongly, it doesn’t suddenly become incumbent on government to fix those wrong personal choices.

That’s how freedoms are lost.

That’s how the concepts of accountability and responsibility for choice and action and decisions are lost.

So why should taxpayers pay for parents to pay for their kids?

Romney’s plan would use money already allotted to other entitlement programs, including some that are targeted to the poor.

But the way to maintain America’s limited government is not to take from one badly formed plan to create another — not to take from Peter and pay Peter’s equally entitlement-minded but younger brother. Rather, it’s to bolster the principles and agendas and ideas that make America great, while wiping clear the stains that degrade America’s greatness.

America is great because America is free. Supposedly, anyway. But America’s system of limited governance has been stretched thin by entitlement programs that foster dependence on the government while squashing individual development, individual growth, individual achievement — and the whole notion of individual accountability. Just because it’s been done for so long doesn’t mean it’s not an aberration of what framers intended with the Constitution and with the democratic-republic they created.

Romney’s call to take money from the hard-working to give to a select segment of society is nothing short of redistributing resources — redistributing wealth. And that’s a socialist system.

Let’s call it what it is.

And socialism is a cancer that’s killing America’s freedoms and driving out the basic core concept of exceptionalism in this country — that is, of rights coming from God — and all the while lifting up the entitled, demanding, helpless mindset of resources and freedoms coming from government.

America can’t have freedom absent individual accountability. Americans can’t claim freedoms if they refuse to pay the consequences for their actions.

A government that serves to provide for everyone, from cradle to grave, is a government that will grow until it bursts, ushering in a time of chaos, confusion and ultimately tyranny and dictatorship.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.

First appeared at The Washington Times.