spending Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

One of the major themes of this blog is the individualist conviction that your life belongs to you—and that in morality and in politics one must never forget that fact. If you want an unforgettable example of what it means to forget (or evade) that fact, check out this recent New York Times editorial, “The Real Spending Problem.”

What is the real spending problem, according to the Times? Believe it or not, it’s your freedom to spend your own money. No, seriously.

Each year, the government doles out tax breaks worth $1.1 trillion. That is more than the cost of Medicare and Medicaid combined. . . .

Tax breaks work like spending. Giving a deduction for certain activities, like homeownership or retirement savings, is the same as writing a government check to subsidize those activities. Functionally, they mimic entitlements. Like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, they are available, year in and year out, in full, to all who qualify. Yet in budget talks, Republicans ignore tax entitlements, which flow mostly to high-income taxpayers, while pushing to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Now, if you found those paragraphs baffling, it’s probably because you’re thinking that there’s kind of a big difference between tax breaks and entitlements: tax breaks involve the government taking less of the money you’ve earned through blood, sweat, and hard work—while entitlements involve seizing more of those earnings and handing them out to other people.

But the Times’s argument becomes graspable once you realize that the left doesn’t look at things that way. It looks at everything from a thoroughly collectivist perspective, where all individuals are interchangeable, their wealth is pooled, and what matters is “society” and its representative, the state.

From that perspective, it’s true that there is no essential difference between entitlements and tax cuts. They are both “costs” to the government: Tax cuts leave resources in the hands of “society” rather than moving them into the pockets of the state, while entitlements shift resources from the pockets of the state back to “society.” Different process, same result.

But the individualist and collectivist perspectives are not “equally valid.” The left’s collectivist perspective is totally false—there is no entity “society” made up of interchangeable units. And it’s totally evil—because pretending that there is a collective means, in practice, treating actual individuals as if their lives and rights don’t matter.

Yaron and I tackle the sequester, over at Politix:

The sequester debate is a national embarrassment - though not for the reasons you might think.

We are debating whether shaving a few percent off the government’s bloated budget will bring the country to its knees. It’s a good thing the Founders are long dead, because if George Washington or James Madison saw this, they would regard it as a shameful farce.

A few percent off the budget? Their question would be: What happened to the idea of principled limitson government - limits which, if adhered to, would mean reducing the size of government more on the order of 60 percent, 70 percent, or more?

Whole thing here.

I discussed the sequester “cuts” on Butler on Business. Check it out. My segment starts about 35 minutes in.

According to Breitbart.com:

When Charles Brown of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service asked “if there was any latitude” in how officials might allocate sequester cuts to reduce negatively impacting fish inspections, Brown received the following reply:

“We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHISwould eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”

Lawmakers say the email is further evidence that the Obama Administration is seeking to inflict maximum pain for the minimal $85 billion in cuts.

This reminded me of something Thomas Sowell wrote a few days ago:

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?

The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

More from Sowell here.