What Price Limited Government - Road to the Middle Class

IF YOU ATTENDED a Tea Party recently you were sure to have heard speakers talk about “limited government” and “liberty.” But what does it mean? When does government cease to be limited?

We could look at the numbers. If you go to usgovernmentspending.com and its new home page, you could take a look at one of the pie charts that helpfully show the division of the economy between private and public sector. Right now, in 2009, we are looking at 45 percent of the economy run by the government, as the chart shows.

It’s a daunting number, but still, we still have our liberties, or, as our liberal friends say, our rights. But if you select the year 1909 in the convenient usgovernmentspending.com dropdown control you get this:

That is a horse of a different color. Imagine that! A government sector so small that you can’t even squeeze the label into the pie chart! The number, for those of you without fighter-pilot eyes, is 7.8 percent. To us, living in the era of big government and CNN reporterettes shilling for the liberals, it seems incomprehensible. How could America survive on such a small public sector?

No doubt the Americans of 1909 would ask a different question. How can America possibly thrive when it has to support such a large government sector?

The massive increases in government sector planned by the Obama administration are all part of a grand strategy, writes Charles Krauthammer this week.

In the service of his ultimate mission — the leveling of social inequalities — President Obama offers a tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care, federalized education (ultimately guaranteed through college) and a cash-cow carbon tax (or its equivalent) to subsidize the other two.

It’s tempting to think of the Obamunists as fiendishly clever, executing on a grand plan to take over the world. But I don’t believe that politicians and their advisors think that way. The Obama agenda simply aggregates the demands of the various powerful interests in the Democratic Party.

Nationalized health care? Most Democrats simply believe in “health care” as a right; it’s one of the articles of the liberal faith.

Federalized education? Merely Democratic interests at work. The college professors want more money for colleges; the teachers want more money for schools; and the feminists want their pre-school children off their hands.

Carbon taxes? Every liberal believes that we are destroying the planet and that you and I must live simply so that others may simply live.

The problem is that each of these efforts reduce Americans more and more to the status of subjects. When the government runs health care the government will decide what health care you will get. The Obamanoids understand this, according to Krauthammer:

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical "comparative effectiveness research"? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is "best practice" for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you’ve laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

And certainly the most obvious “best practice” is to deny funding for expensive procedures for the elderly who are going to die anyway. If there’s a grand strategy it is right there.

Grand strategy or not, the liberal giant will lumber along, burping up bossy new ideas to spend our money and control us, until we decide to stop it.

It can be done. You can see them doing it in Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

Benjamin Franklin spent almost 20 years in Britain during the 1750s and 1760s trying to tell the Brits that Americans were getting more and more annoyed at their subject status. And the Brits, Lord This and Lord That, got angrier and angrier at the presumption of the colonials. Nobody in Britland had the least idea that the bloody colonials would rise up and rebel.

What Americans wanted in those days was the right to govern themselves. They couldn’t, because the bossy Brits knew better and wouldn’t let them.

Today we’re oppressed by bossy liberals who also deny us the right to govern ourselves and who have plans to boss us even more.

There is a simple answer to the bossiness of Brits and the bossiness of liberals. Limited Government. Here’s how it might look, one day, on usgovernmentspending.com:

That 25 percent in 2020 is not just hot air. When asked, Americans tell pollsters that their taxes shouldn’t exceed 25 percent of income.

Do you think that we have the cojones to insist upon it?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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