Six Reasons to Downsize the Federal Government
1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy. The bulk of federal spending goes toward subsidies and benefit payments, which generally do not enhance economic productivity. With lower productivity, average American incomes will fall.
2. As federal spending rises, it creates pressure to raise taxes now and in the future. Higher taxes reduce incentives for productive activities such as working, saving, investing, and starting businesses. Higher taxes also increase incentives to engage in unproductive activities such as tax avoidance.
3. Much federal spending is wasteful and many federal programs are mismanaged. Cost overruns, fraud and abuse, and other bureaucratic failures are endemic in many agencies. It’s true that failures also occur in the private sector, but they are weeded out by competition, bankruptcy, and other market forces. We need to similarly weed out government failures.
4. Federal programs often benefit special interest groups while harming the broader interests of the general public. How is that possible in a democracy? The answer is that logrolling or horse-trading in Congress allows programs to be enacted even though they are only favored by minorities of legislators and voters. One solution is to impose a legal or constitutional cap on the overall federal budget to force politicians to make spending trade-offs.
5. Many federal programs cause active damage to society, in addition to the damage caused by the higher taxes needed to fund them. Programs usually distort markets and they sometimes cause social and environmental damage. Some examples are housing subsidies that helped to cause the financial crises, welfare programs that have created dependency, and farm subsidies that have harmed the environment.
6. The expansion of the federal government in recent decades runs counter to the American tradition of federalism. Federal functions should be “few and defined” in James Madison’s words, with most government activities left to the states. The explosion in federal aid to the states since the 1960s has strangled diversity and innovation in state governments because aid has been accompanied by a mass of one-size-fits-all regulations.
For more, see DownsizingGovernment.org.
Weekend Links
- Prepare for a national debate over devoting more federal aid to Yemen.
- Reason Magazine: Why is Washington spending so much on the military?
- An update on the ongoing tension between mainland China and Taiwan.
- Top experts will meet at Cato next week to discuss the Obama administration’s counterrorism record after one year in office.
- Podcast: “Indefinitely Confining the ‘Sexually Dangerous‘” featuring Ilya Shapiro.
Elmer Kelton’s Cowboy Individualism
John J. Miller of National Review introduces many of us to Elmer Kelton, who, he writes in an email, “may be the best writer you’ve never heard of.” Kelton, who died in August, wrote both classic and modern Westerns. And while he may not have written the Great American Novel, he just might have written the Great Texas Novel, The Time It Never Rained. It sounds like the story of a classic American:
The tale centers on Charlie Flagg, a stubborn rancher who battles the unyielding drought. He also resists the government’s relief programs with a determination that his friends find both admirable and strange. What emerges is the portrait of a rugged libertarian: “I just want to live by my own lights and be left the hell alone,” says Flagg.
The federal aid turns out to have bad consequences. It fuels inflation, turns neighbor against neighbor, and chips away at bedrock freedoms. Each time a rancher surrenders a piece of his independence, says Flagg, “he’s given up a little of his self-respect, a little of the pride he used to have in takin’ care of himself by himself.”
Kelton’s father might have preferred that he actually be a cowboy, but at least he became one of the great modern advocates of the cowboy ethic:
In 1995, based largely on the accomplishment of “The Time It Never Rained,” the Western Writers of America voted him the greatest western writer of all time. Finishing a distant second: Willa Cather.
Kelton may not have grown up to be a cowboy, but he devoted himself to explaining and defending the cowboy’s way of life. Last year, in the Texas Monthly, he observed that in certain circles the word “cowboy” has become a pejorative, as in “cowboy capitalism” or “cowboy diplomacy.” He responded by trying to explain “what the cowboy is and always has been—a common man in an uncommon profession, giving more than he receives, living by a code of conduct his detractors will never understand.”
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