An Adult Conversation about the Budget

To listen to the debates on the deficit and the debt, one would think that wealth emanates from the government. Underlying every argument is the notion that government cuts imply pain and pose a drastic threat to our economy.

But government spending itself is pain because all money spent by the government represents the confiscation of today’s wealth or future wealth, via direct taxation, currency devaluation or debt ad infinitum. By taking current wealth out of private hands, it is allocated not according to a market economy driven by the people but by a political economy in which “investment” yields returns solely for the politicians in the form of votes and favored classes in the form of monetary or regulatory handouts; by devaluation, savers are wiped out and borrowers and spenders are rewarded, a sure-fire way to bankrupt a people, given that economies grow through savings and investment, not consumption; by piling on the debt, the government pushes up interest rates for all of us, leading investment to flow out of the US and crushing corporations and individuals alike.

All government today rests upon a premise that people should be lucky that they get to keep a percentage of the fruits of their labor, with government rightfully conferring benefits on the interests that support it. Which is why it was never intended for government to be in the business of conferring benefits in the first place – and I mean benefits to anyone, be it labor unions, corporations or particular classes of people.

The burden should have always been on the politician to prove to his elector why ANY dollar taken from the individual should be redistributed to someone else. For government’s clearly defined bounds were created to ensure that the usurpation of wealth from private citizens would be minimal, and occur only when it supported a service that all people benefitted equally from, such as our national defense.

Interestingly enough, you’ll notice that when it comes to Democrats who are willing to discuss budget cuts, the first place they look is defense. We can all agree that there is misappropriation of money when it comes to the armed forces (take anti-western theocratic nation-building for example), just as there is in every orifice of our government, but there is great irony in looking to cut defense first. For defense is one of the only legitimate, Constitutionally mandated things that the government provides, and we all benefit from it.

Despite leftist derision of our military, it is the military that is the only thing standing between our “pacifists” (despite their support of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Palestinian” cause) and those who wish to annihilate them. A cynical person might argue that the left wants us to scale back our military so that our strength in the world is weakened and our political and economic system is destabilized paving the way for a revolution of sorts. But that would be mere cynicism.

Nevertheless, to understand how we got to a position in which it is viewed as courageous to propose a budget plan which still increases spending by trillions of dollars, and continues to grow the debt, it is important to understand the transformation of our people.

While there were always those who shamefully used government to their advantage, it was not until the early 20th century that this process became “democratized,” where every group could reach into the wealth redistribution honey-pot and politicians lost all incentive to balance budgets while gaining all incentive to coddle people with cradle to grave benefits, creating dependent classes of voting citizens. This was in effect progressive — that largess was now to be provided to all segments of the population, not just industrialists or financiers.

Over time, our character has grown weak largely as the result of this process – a process that frankly rests on the shoulders not of the politicians who merely acted in their rational self-interest given the circumstances, but on the voters who sanctioned this debauchery of our culture.

While I commend those such as Paul Ryan and perhaps to a greater extent Rand Paul for their efforts to deal with our impending bankruptcy, it still bears noting that underlying all of our fiscal problems is the disposition of our people, who believe that government should subsidize particular interest groups, that this assistance is moral and that it produces better results than if wealth were left in the hands of those who earned it, and people took responsibility for their own livelihoods.

When the national debate centers not on the pain of budget cuts but on the pain of continuing to maintain even a vestige of the welfare state, then we will be having an adult conversation. When the national debate centers not on the charity of government spending but on its criminality in robbing us of our property and our morals, then we will be having an adult conversation. This will require a sea change not in our politics but in our people.