The Republican Obsession with Money

In a previous post, I argued that conservatives have a highly materialistic view of life, that in shaping public policy at least they tend to simply overlook personal, psychological, or spiritual needs like esteem or belonging. In this post I want to argue that the conservative outlook is highly materialistic using the overall approach to budgetary issues that Republicans have (extremely successfully) championed of late. Yes, drawing overarching conclusions about political philosophy from budgeting styles. Anyway, I'll begin by outlining how I think a rational country should approach the whole question of the budget, government spending, and taxation. Here's how it goes:

• Step 1: The country as a whole should decide, through an appropriate political process, what things they wish to do collectively as a society and what things they do not want to do collectively, either because they are inappropriate for societal action or because they are just plain undesirable.
• Step 2: You figure out what the stuff in Step 1 is going to cost. 
• Step 3: Through an appropriate political process, the country should decide how to raise enough revenue to finance the activities of Step 1 in a way that minimizes the adverse effects of the tax burden.
• Bonus Step: Throw in a dash of good old-fashioned Keynesian counter-cyclical budgeting to manage the business cycle.

That's it. It's very simple: what should we do, how much will it cost, and how can we most easily pay for it? Note that you start by considering what you want to do before you consider how much it will cost. Theoretically there might be a level of overall taxation that is really unhealthy for the economy, so if you find out in Step 1 that the programs you'd like your government to undertake cost 80% of the economy you might want to go back and rethink your decisions. But basically you just figure out what you want to do, and then how to finance it. So the question you ask of any individual government program is, "Is this program good?" Maybe at some point you ask instead, "Is this program good enough to justify spending this much on it?", but that's really only if you get hard-up for money (and not because of a recession; see the Bonus Step!).

When Republicans look at the whole equation of spending and revenues that we call the budget, they do not look at it through this process. Instead they start with an agenda: to lower government spending. As much as possible. Regardless of what level it's at already. It doesn't matter, less spending is better. Like the bureaucrats looking to tax, uh, thingy in a certain Monty Python sketch, but in reverse, they need to find something new to cut. (Actually, I reckon some of them might want to tax thingy, but that's a whole 'nother story...) Why do they take this approach, rather than the reasonable algorithm I outline above? I believe that they are following logic that goes something like this:

1. Liberty is good!
2. The size of government is a direct measure of infringements on liberty
3. The "size of government" can be measured for this purpose by the amount of government spending

Obviously I'm not quibbling with the first point: liberty is, indeed, good. The second point is very wrong, but I've addressed that elsewhere. What I'm discussing here is the third point, which is also very, very wrong. To see why, let me use the following example: suppose you have a city-state (just to make things simple), and suppose that it spends a lot of money on its police force. In return for that money it gets a very big, powerful police force. Actually, suppose you have two such city-states, with equal-sized economies and that spend the same amount on their big, powerful police forces. If Point #3 above is correct, then since the price tag of these two police forces are equal, they should each contribute the same amount to infringing the people's liberty.

But let's say that in one city, the police are used to keep the city streets safe and clean, and that because the police are so well-funded they are able to keep crime to a bare minimum without resorting to any abusive tactics. But in the other city, the police aren't particularly used for law enforcement at all: instead, they are used to systemically terrorize the people of the city and keep them in a state of fear and oppression. The same amount of money is being spent in both cases, but I don't think anyone would reasonably maintain that the effect on liberty is the same. In the good city the police increase freedom from crime at the very least, though they might also reduce certain other kinds of liberty depending on how we want to define the word. But since all they do is enforce reasonable laws like, you know, don't kill people and don't steal things, I think most people would agree they do fairly little to infringe on liberty. The police in the bad city, on the other hand, devote all of their efforts to infringing the liberty of the citizenry. Clearly you get less liberty in the second case, despite the same overall "size of government" as measured in strictly economic terms.

So what's plaguing Republicans in this debate is that they can't get it through their heads that an increase in government spending is not necessarily an increase in government power, in real political-theoretical terms. Because they have this naive view that a government is what it spends, and not what it does, when they want to shrink the government that means they want to shrink spending. It's an a priori agenda, and it means that they approach the whole concept of government backwards. So yes, I draw broad conclusions about political philosophy from a party's approach to budgeting: the Republicans have a simplistic, overly-material view of government. And oh yeah, it might cause us to destroy the economy on a lark in a few days. Fun times!

*Side note: of course, I'm being a little bit "generous" to Republicans in positing that they mean what they say they mean. The real answer, I suspect, is that the Republicans are the party of monied interests, our society generally believes that monied interests should pay a disproportionate share of the tax burden, and so those monied interests whom the Republicans represent want to minimize tax revenue so they can minimize the amount they have to pay. But since conservatives insist on making what I suspect are disingenuous arguments about political theory in public, I'll insist on refuting them.