Salter: Keep government small and local
By Alexander William Salter
At the beginning of the 20th century, government at all levels consumed about 10 percent of the national income. State and local governments used up twice as much as the federal government. Today, the situation is vastly different. The public sector devours 30 percent of the national income, with the federal government out-consuming state and local governments roughly two to one. These are the most important political trends of the last 100 years: A massive increase in the overall size of government combined with a reversal in the layer of government with the biggest footprint.
Defenders of ordered liberty should regard these changes warily. For libertarians in particular, they’re calamitous. Freedom and order thrive when government is strictly limited. Yet if the public sector must expand to meet some new challenge, it should happen at the smallest scale possible. These pillars of political wisdom have been largely ignored since the Progressive era. An uncontrolled, unaccountable, irresponsible government is the result.
Pollsters will tell you Americans don’t much care for these “procedural” niceties. So long as the economy is strong at home and the military isn’t getting whipped abroad, voters are supposedly unconcerned about the scale and scope of government. Let’s hope this sleepy indifference to federalist fundamentals doesn’t last. Outcomes matter. But process matters, too—or else America’s Constitutional tradition is bunk.
Remember what we discussed before? “The only winning move is not to play.” The solution isn’t feeding Leviathan different prey. It’s getting rid of Leviathan! Until we radically downsize the government, reallocating to states and municipalities those few activities that are truly in the public interest, we’ll never experience the civic flourishing that is ours by right.
Washington, DC shouldn’t do anything that can be accomplished in Austin (or right here in Lubbock!) at reasonable cost. In our federal system, the primary responsibility of the federal government is foreign policy. It’s proper to keep the armed forces in fit-fighting shape, as well as maintain a diplomatic corps capable of engaging other nations responsibly. There are some national-level domestic duties, of course. The court system is important. Basic infrastructure is justifiable, as are national parks and the space program. Reasonable people can disagree about specific programs. Nevertheless, for most of what Uncle Sam does, the case for a national response is pretty weak.
But what about environmental protections? A simple pollution tax could get the incentives right. No need for mammoth entities like the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency, which have predictably evolved into dispensers of political favors. And how about the social safety net? We can’t give up on Social Security and Medicare! Spoiler alert: we already have. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicts the Medicare Hospital Insurance Fund will be insolvent by 2028, and Social Security in its entirety by 2035. These programs were always accounting gimmicks used to purchase votes with future tax dollars that never materialized. Let’s just be honest and get Uncle Sam out of the health care and retirement care businesses, at which it displays no particular skill.
Sadly, state and local public officials are some of the biggest opponents of responsible government. Many governors thunder about the importance of federalism when they’re on the campaign trail. Yet once cozily ensconced in office, they’re happy to take as much Beltway loot as they can get their hands on, because it lets them dispense goodies to their political allies. (I’m looking at you, Greg Abbott.) Remember, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” You can’t defend local government if you’re attached to the Washington cash spigot. There’s a reason the Founders paid such careful attention to government’s fiscal prerogatives. The power of the purse is the power to create dependency. But only independent layers of government can protect citizens from Imperial City overreach.
The perpetual struggle between Team Red and Team Blue for control over the national government is largely a distraction. As long as state and local authorities remain junior partners, the public sector will remain institutionally irresponsible. The American system is built on federalism for a reason. The whole project is designed to empower the protective and productive functions of government while forestalling its predatory potentials. Until and unless a critical mass of politicians is willing to answer 95 percent of press questions with, “That’s a matter for state and local governments, so it’s none of my business,” the public sector will become ever more expensive yet less effective.
Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, a research fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute, and a member of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal’s community editorial board. The views in this column are solely his own.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Salter: Keep government small and local
