Something to keep in mind this election season


The real value of those election year promises
David Schlosser speaks the truth.

Even when a candidate commits to spend millions or billions of dollars for new programs, there’s always more where that came from.  After all, the United States of America is the richest nation in the world.  It’s the richest nation in the history of the world.  A nation as rich as ours should be able to find the resources necessary to provide universal education, universal health care, universal defense, universal this, and universal that. 

This is a beautiful fallacy.  It serves candidates perfectly, because it answers every question and no one can argue against it.  We enjoy such extraordinary wealth that our standard of living is literally inconceivable to billions of our global neighbors.  No matter what your priority happens to be – missile defense, wind energy, affordable housing, substance abuse treatment centers – America, according to most candidates for public office, is rich enough to pay for it.

Of course, that fallacy is as dangerous as it is beautiful because it relieves everyone of their need to set priorities.  The classroom cliché about guns and butter retains its currency for a reason.  Although simplified by forcing a trade-off between only two resources, it reflects the truth that candidates dare not admit: our universe of resources is finite.  The economy is only as big as it is, and it will support only a limited amount of public spending.  Our nation’s founders recognized those limits, and they used the Constitution to apply those limits to the Federal government.  They enumerated the powers that the Federal government can exercise, and reserved all other powers for individuals or other levels of government.

In other words, our nation’s founders understood that power – the absence of limits, and the absence of the need to set priorities – tends to corrupt.  Without a balanced budget requirement, with no willpower, and with justifications for new and expanded programs from every quarter, our Federal rulers have no limits to their power.  They can commit future generations to spending our children and grandchildren’s taxes to pay back the loans we take out from all the other countries of the world to pay for all the programs that seem so affordable because we’re the richest country in the history of the world.

I look at it this way. Every single dollar spent by the Federal government means about three dollars in taxes, interest, and waste. And for what? To take it out of one person's pocket and put part of it into someone else's?

What is worse, you don't get to decide who gets your money.

If it weren't government doing this, we would call it extortion.

If we weren't conditioned to accept this as normal and necessary, we would be screaming "Thief!"

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - September 7, 2006 at 05:00 PM  Tag


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