Perhaps the biggest strength of our free enterprise system is that, in a free market, the economy is self-correcting. It will adjust to adverse circumstances, and the less interference the government attempts on the price system, and the fewer restrictions it imposes on freedom, the better for us all – but it will adjust, even when government makes mistakes.
Mistakes such as Obamacare, which was promoted as the nearest thing to heaven on earth but which raised costs without improving services or their delivery. And we could say similar things about almost every other effort to make the world perfect through government regulation, such as Dodd-Frank, and the “big government” candidates will always be promising a so-called panacea to the world’s ills, and it will almost always be enormously expensive, outrageously intrusive, and once set in motion, almost impossible to stop.
Republicans aren’t immune to this condition, and even if they don’t advocate quite the spending as their Democratic colleagues, they don’t take enough steps to reverse the trends.
Inflation kickers or automatic yearly increases are a large part of the problem, for if we had frozen spending at the level in any given year in the last ten or fifteen years, we would have balanced the budget a long time ago. But, things being what they are, if a President merely wants to reduce the anticipated rate of increase in an agency’s budget, he is immediately attacked for making “savage cuts.” And many a vote has been won by people who promised to spend more on something (and that includes things like defense and Border Walls, too).
The federal budget is passed by Congress, and it always is a compromise of some degree or other, but no matter what the compromise, spending always seems to go ever upward, as few in government seem willing to give up any role government has taken up over the years. It has been said that the toughest thing to kill is a federal program, and although in the abstract everybody wants to be thrifty and frugal, usually all it takes is a couple of sad stories from people who benefit from said program and the appetite for stopping that program quickly disappears.
We think the budget rules say something along the lines of no new spending can be approved unless the money is taken from some other part of the budget, but that clearly makes it even harder to stop or curtail a program.
What can we do? Well, we can stop thinking that the only way to make things better is by spending federal money, and if one wants to find examples of the government throttling an industry one will not have to look very far.
Of course, the biggest and most expensive parts of the budget aren’t “programs” so much as they are entitlements, that is, something a qualified person has the right to claim. While from time to time, Congresses and Presidents do trim or even eliminate a program, they almost never limit those entitlements, and that is where the vast majority of the money goes. And anyone who favors restrictions on the entitlement machine is branded as greedy, cheap, selfish or cruel.
But, the government seems to want to make as many people as possible dependent on it. That is how candidates win votes, but the security that dependency conveys actually diminishes freedom and imposes limits on what we as free people can accomplish. The more free a market is, the more it will grow, and the more it grows, the more prosperous we will be. President Trump is experiencing unprecedented delays in having his appointments confirmed, due to the application of the “supermajority” rules of the US Senate. Imagine how much the federal budget could shrink if spending programs required a supermajority to pass, or if candidates vied for votes by spending less rather than spending more.
It’s about time to spout out a few trite old sayings, such as a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have; or – it is impossible to tax, spend or borrow one’s way to prosperity; or – there is no such thing as a free lunch; or, it is pretty easy to spend someone else’s money. We could go on, but just because a phrase has entered the realm of cliché doesn’t diminish its underlying truth.
Overspending not only wastes money but generous welfare state apparatus can end up subsidizing harmful lifestyles, and big spending programs can lead to waste, fraud and abuse. Politicians never tire of promising something that somebody else (usually some future generation) will have to pay for. Shouldn’t we think more about the burdens that today’s debt places on tomorrow’s citizens?