We Can't Have Big Government a la Carte

Statement

Even die-hard fans of Big Government usually admit that a wide range of federal programs are pointless or worse. But they urge us not to "throw the baby out with the bath water." This sounds very sensible, but it overlooks the key fact that the difference between good and bad government programs is rarely as uncontroversial as the difference between babies and bath water. One voter's "waste, fraud, and abuse" may be another voter's "essential public function." In fact, I often meet people who are so attached to some particular program that they cannot bring themselves to wish for smaller government because that might lead to less money for their favorite.

Almost everyone, including me, can find something in a $3.8 trillion budget that is personally appealing even though it can't be justified on libertarian principles like the non-aggression principle. Whether it's environmental regulations or high-speed rail or NASA or foreign aid, these people essentially ask: Can't we embrace the benefits of small government generally, but make an exception for my pet program?

This sounds theoretically possible, but I think our experience justifies us in saying it is not. Big Government seems not to be available a la carte. We have to take the bad with the good. And that means that if the choice between private action and government program is at all close, we ought to have a very strong bias for the private option. Because the pet programs we can't justify as protections of our persons and property are almost never so great as to be worth the high social cost of a government that acts without strong limits.

Much of what's wrong with Congress was illustrated by the infamous "bridge to nowhere" that was funded and then de-funded a few years ago in Alaska. For those who have forgotten, this was widely reported to be a bridge from the city of Ketchikan, Alaska to an almost-uninhabited island off the coast. But I've been there, and that's not the whole story. The island may be (almost) uninhabited, but there's an airport on it, and the point of the bridge was to enable the residents of Ketchikan to drive their cars to the airport instead of having to take a ferry there. Seeing it first hand, I had to admit that a bridge there would be pretty useful.

But how useful? Evidently, it wasn't useful enough for the residents of Ketchikan to spend their own tax dollars on it. And evidently, it wasn't useful enough for any private entity to build the bridge and try to recover the investment by charging tolls. Evidently, the people of Ketchikan only wanted the bridge if it could be paid for by somebody else.

The flaw in this reasoning is that the people of Ketchikan aren't the only ones who think this way. Too many of us treat government as if it is exactly what Frederic Bastiat once called it: "the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." And as a result, the people of Ketchikan don't get a bridge at everyone else's expense; we all get far too many bridges and other expenditures that no one was willing to spend their own money on. And we also get bank bailouts, and subsidized electric cars, and all manner of corporate welfare stuffed into the tax code. We are like a large group of people who go to a restaurant and order much more food than we can eat because we're splitting the check with the rest of our group. We don't end up with something for nothing; we end up with about 300% of something at 400% of its cost.

The best way to prevent bridge-to-nowhere-itis is to insist on a strong limiting principle that distinguishes truly public matters from private benefits--a strong limiting principle like the non-aggression principle. It sounds pragmatic to make case-by-case determinations about federal programs instead of sticking to such a principle. But the problem with ad hoc picking and choosing is that it makes members of Congress practically incapable of saying no to any significant constituency. It's very hard to bail out banks and then say no to automakers or local governments. It's very hard to explain why Congress should let the free market work in any sector unless Congress lets the free market work in every sector. And it's very hard to blow money on any program as idiotic as "cash for clunkers" and then say no to equally idiotic proposals like "cash for caulkers" or "cash for can-openers." The slope gets very slippery very fast, and we know that for a fact because we're currently sliding down it at breakneck speed.

Some people think there is no limiting principle; that it's OK to fund Big Government programs as long as they're popular. After all, if more than fifty percent of us want to support such programs, why shouldn't we? But it's a fantasy to think that Congress responds only to numerical majorities. Sugar quotas are demonstrably bad for nearly everyone who buys sugar--a very large majority, as political majorities go. Yet sugar quotas persist precisely because the group they benefit is so much smaller than the group they injure. It is the concentration of very large benefits for a very small number of sugar producers that makes the sugar producers willing to spend relatively large amounts of money lobbying for the quotas. And it is the wide spreading of the costs of the quotas (through higher sugar prices) that virtually eliminates any significant opposition to the quotas. This phenomenon repeats itself on page after page of the federal budget, and the only way for us to change it is to insist on a principled basis for rejecting all appeals for special treatment of this or that business or industry.

Paradoxically, the pick-and-choose approach leads to wasteful spending so consistently that we really ought to consider it an iron law of politics: Once we move beyond the protection of persons and property, it is never possible to have the good spending without the bad. If you vote to fund mental health programs at the National Institute of Mental Health, you will someday learn that NIMH spent $823,200 to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their private parts. NIMH actually did that. If you're learning that now for the first time, you will be shocked, but you shouldn't be. Not anymore.

This principled approach for rejecting federal programs even when they are popular parallels our traditional approach to civil liberties. We stand up for the free speech rights of some pretty repulsive characters because we know our own rights are measured by what we allow them to say. We don't let the sheriff beat confessions out of the guilty because we don't want him to beat confessions out of the innocent. We act, in other words, like people who understand that sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. We need to bring that kind of thinking to the task of setting our budget and policy priorities. We need to think harder about the terrible programs whenever we're debating a proposal we're tempted to like.

And if we can do that, we'll learn something that may surprise many people. We'll learn that we're a lot better off if we each mind our own business and tell Congress to stick to issues that affect the public at large. It should be shameful for a member of Congress to support sugar quotas, or tax credits for oil exploration. And a representative who tells us how much pork he brought home to our district should be confessing to it, not bragging about it.

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