When it comes to money, most politicians are curiously divided in their minds.
On the one hand, they aren’t averse to spending gobs and gobs of it—millions, billions, and trillions.
Just think of the obscene $1.7 trillion spending bill that’s just about to come down on your children, their children, yea, even unto the seventh son.
People used to say that Republicans were the party of fiscal restraint.
How many just voted for this orgy of fiscal incontinence, larded as it was with “earmarks,” a euphemism for pork.
There’s always more, our masters seem to think, where the last batch of fantasy money came from.
It’s the spigot theory of economics: Just turn the handle of government authority and presto! The tax receipts, the fees, the garnishments, and the sundry redistributed adjustments flow in like rainwater after a storm.
Money for them is the great tool—the great weapon, even—of social reconstitution.
On the other hand, politicians, especially liberals, are deeply suspicious of money.
They seem to believe that it carries a moral taint, especially when any significant amount of it finds its way into the hands of ordinary citizens.
I don’t mean to suggest that they have any objection to money personally.
Clearly, they think it’s OK to amass piles of pelf for themselves.
How did some amass their millions on government salaries?
Clearly, the age of miracles isn’t over.
But in the larger sense—i.e., when they think about society as a whole—they deprecate wealth and the acquisitive instincts that make its accumulation possible.
“I do think,” Obama famously said, “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”
Who or what do you suppose vouchsafed him the standard for that judgment?
It seems to me, however, that there’s a lot to be said for Anthony Trollope’s observation, which he puts into the mouth of Plantagenet Palliser, in his novel “Can You Forgive Her?”
Responding to a character who announces that he lacks “mercenary tendencies,” Palliser observes that “there is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say, common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad.
“A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray.”
I think Trollope was right. And I believe that abandoning the philosophy of mercenary tendencies, rightly understood (as Tocqueville might have put it), is a prescription not only for impoverishment but also for immiseration and, ultimately, for the soft tyranny of democratic despotism.
Of course, Obama wasn’t alone in dissenting from this view.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, shared his suspicion of wealth, as did his heir Karl Marx and countless other would-be benefactors of mankind.
But who, in the end, has actually benefitted mankind more: the capitalist with his wealth-producing “mercenary tendencies” or the do-gooder who deprecates wealth (at least in others) in the name of a “higher” good?
Time was, the role of government in a capitalist society was primarily to secure an environment in which private enterprise could thrive.
Today, the role of government is increasingly to nationalize private enterprise, i.e., destroy it in the name of a “higher” good, what spendthrift politicians have called with Orwellian piquancy a “new era of responsibility” in which government bureaucrats tell you how to run your business, whom to employ, and how much to pay them.
A “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government”: remember that phrase.
And note that a “tectonic”—that is, a fundamental—change between business and government is also a tectonic change between the individual and government.
“What our generation has forgotten,” Friedrich Hayek wrote in “The Road to Serfdom,” “is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.”
The tectonic change in the relationship between business and government, between the individual and government, signals not only the expansion of government control.
It also signals the contraction of individual freedom in the name of what Democratic politicians like to call “fairness” or “equity.”
“Who can doubt,” Hayek asked, “that the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work?”
The chapter of “The Road to Serfdom” in which these words appear is called “Who, Whom?”—the question that, Lenin said, was the fundamental fulcrum of politics.
“Who, Whom?” Hitherto, the genius of the American system has been to short-circuit that brutalizing question by distributing the power of the subject.
Lenin’s “who” is no longer a central and centralizing authority but a multiplicity of actors each with his native interests and prerogatives.
Edmund Burke spoke of the importance to liberty of those “little platoons” that claim our daily allegiance.
James Madison, in “Federalist 51,” made a similar point when he observed that “the policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives” helped encourage the distribution of power and hence the growth of liberty.
The tectonic change contemplated by our government would have us disband those little platoons and assimilate ourselves into the swarming army of the state.
Madison’s “opposite and rival interests,” for these collectivists, impede the progress of “fairness” and interrupt the process of equalizing wealth.
Earlier in The Federalist, Madison observed that there were “two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.”
Madison thought it self-evident that both courses, being inimical to liberty, spelled disaster.
He believed that the protection of that “diversity of faculties” that underwrote the diversity of property was the “first object of government.”
Our current masters in Washington disagree.
They seem willing to experiment with both of the expedients Madison warned against in order to achieve their egalitarian goals.
One of the most depressing things about all these government expropriations is the fact that they operate like a one-way ratchet, always undermining freedom and extending the control of the state.
Once the government sinks its teeth into you, it’s extremely difficult to wiggle free.
The income tax and social security tax, we tend to forget, were both instituted as temporary, emergency measures.
That’s why 1895 is one of my favorite years in U.S. history. In that banner year, the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was unconstitutional. Needless to say, the ruling didn’t last long.
