by Sheldon Richman
Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and In brief.
A note of despair about the prospects for rolling back big government has crept into the public prints lately. Writers who favored reducing political power now strike a pose of supposed realism and counsel resignation to its continued growth. We should be satisfied with trying to slow the expansion of government, they say, or with thinking about how best to finance a bigger state. For example, David Frum, the neoconservative former adviser to President George W. Bush, recently wrote:
The fairest chance to achieve the limited-government agenda passed with only very limited conservative success [in the 1990s]. . . .The state is growing again — and it is pre-programmed to carry on growing. Health spending will rise, pension spending will rise, and taxes will rise. . . .
I think it’s been fairly established now that the Republican party responds far more attentively to the practical needs of business constituencies than to the abstract principles of free-marketeers. . . .
It's one thing to try to slow down opponents as they try to enact their vision of society into law. It’s a very different thing to have a vision of one’s own. . . .
For all the threat we now face from a demographically driven expansion of big government, it is a very different and far less severe threat than the ideologically driven expansion of three decades ago. Sometimes intellectual movements are called to life to save their countries at a time of challenge — and then gradually fade away as their work is done, as the Whigs faded away in the 1850s or the Progressives after the First World War. It may be that the future of [small-government] conservatism is to recognize that it belongs to the past.
In response to that article, Bruce Bartlett, author of Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, had this to say:
Like David, I am very pessimistic about the prospects for conservative/libertarian reform. He is exactly right that demographically-driven federal spending is rising rapidly as the baby boom generation nears retirement, and the best political opportunity for restructuring Social Security and Medicare has passed. As the percentage of voters benefiting from these programs in their current form rises, it is unrealistic to think that spending for them can be reduced except marginally. . . .I concluded that conservatives and libertarians need to think seriously about how best to finance the government spending that is in the pipeline. Given the magnitude of that spending growth — on the order of 10 percent of the gross domestic product over the next generation even if no new government programs are enacted or current ones expanded — I have suggested that it is time to think about a value-added tax for the U.S. . . .
[T]oday government spending is totally dominated by interest on the debt that is impossible to cut, entitlements that are almost impossible to cut, and national defense, which is unlikely to be cut for the foreseeable future. This means that more than 80 percent of the budget is effectively off limits.
Bartlett points out that the young people who will pay the crushing pension and medical bills of the soon-retiring throng aren't politically active, so the politicians can safely ignore them. Moreover, one cannot assume that the logical reaction of young people to the unfairness of the current fiscal system will be to overthrow it. They may become even more determined to make sure that they get theirs, too.
Is It Really So?
One can become depressed reading this sort of thing. But it does reflect the fact that outside a fairly small circle of principled libertarians, there is virtually no radical analysis of the state's systematic transfer of wealth from the industrious classes to the politically favored, much less a radical program for establishing true individual liberty and laissez faire for the first time in history.
Is the effort to roll back the power of the state doomed?
Let's hope not. One way to find out is to reinvigorate the pitch for freedom and to make sure that young people encounter it. Our case has many parts, but one that deserves extra emphasis is the relationship between freedom and responsibility. To some people freedom is scary because responsibility is scary. Many more people might be for freedom if they could slough off any unpleasant consequences. But that's not how it works. A political environment that saves us from self-responsibility will necessarily save us from freedom too. As it used to be with love and marriage, freedom and responsibility go together like a horse and carriage. I can imagine circumstances where we have responsibility without freedom, but not the other way around. Better to have both than neither.
We can see how giving up self-responsibility leads inexorably to a loss of freedom. If the taxpayers finance everyone's medical care, taxpayer advocates sooner or later will demand measures to stop the inevitable explosion in the government's budget. If you insist on smoking, why should you get tax-funded treatment for your preventable disease? The strained European welfare states have cut back on medical coverage, putting those governments in the triage business. A tax on unhealthy foods (or foods alleged to be such) is already on the table and is not unthinkable. Motorcycle-helmet laws are justified in the name of saving the public the expense of supporting comatose bikers. Who knows what creative political minds will come up with when faced with government bankruptcy? A retiree living at taxpayer expense is at the mercy of political control, marginal at first perhaps, but we know how frogs react to gradually heated water: They don't.
Once we start down this road, we know where it leads. Or we should know. Alexis de Tocqueville knew it in the early nineteenth century as he toured the young America:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. . . . For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Therein lies freedom's pitch to the young (and not so young): Do you wish forever to be swaddled children in the national orphanage? If freedom is to be reclaimed and, as logically required, the state rolled back, we must defend liberty on the grounds that living is indeed worth the trouble.