The notion that anything in government is efficient is ridiculous on its face. Nobody believes it, and yet everyone asking for new revenues is using it as a load-bearing assumption.
Like governments everywhere, our state government growth in the last 30 years has well outpaced population growth and inflation. It is a reflection of a culture-wide overestimation of government competency, going back at least to the Great Depression.
In that time there has been no end to schemes and optimism for government to fix things it cannot fix.
On the other hand, there has been seemingly no beginning of honest appraisals of the success of these programs. Results don’t seem to matter, only intentions.
For this reason our age will embarrass our great-great-great grandkids, or else make them feel superior. We’ll be known as the age of public policy worn as an accessory, like a scarf.
For us, they’ll say, support for a thing had little to do with a searching attempt to fix a problem, and had mostly to do with talking points that make supporters look good in light conversation.
People and parties whose business is growing government, and they are legion, aren’t prospecting for solutions to social ills. They are prospecting for causes that go well with a black dress and a Prada handbag. And a cause is as fashionable as its talking points are powerful and obvious, even if they are utterly misguided.
Take welfare, for example. Never was there a cause better fitted for our superficial time. When LBJ was selling the “War on Poverty”, designed to wipe out poverty forever in America, who could oppose it, especially in elite circles where such god-like estimations of human potential are culturally embedded?
Who could have known that welfare would eventually destroy marriage among the poor by giving more money to single poor people than married poor people? Who could have known welfare recipients who get entry level jobs would have welfare benefits cut by more than the job pays, destroying the incentive to work? Back then could you say that the concept of perpetual welfare seemed an awful lot like a lifetime allowance – not great for cultivating responsibility and maturity?
No, the war on poverty was going to end poverty as we know it. You can’t oppose that.
More damning, when Charles Murray authored the book “Losing Ground”, detailing how social problems were all being made worse by the government programs designed to fix them, few people actually cared. Only those who were genuinely interested in fixing social ills cared. For the biggest liberal contingent, people only desirous to be thought of as fixing social ills, such a book didn’t ping their radar.
This relates to our state government. The grow-government crowd is desperate for us to assume our government is efficient. That way, any perceived need has only one solution: more revenues.
Introduce the idea that there may be waste, fraud, and over-hiring in government agencies and schools; introduce the idea that there may be inefficiency and suddenly a better solution emerges to perceived funding needs: cut spending.
Western governments scarcely even know how to cut budgets. Frankly, there has never been a people who thoroughly demanded it.
After all, government employees themselves are normally much more motivated to protest the cuts than the rest of the state is to insist on them. The bureaucrats are comparatively few, but the cuts will affect them quickly and seriously.
This is what makes the tea party chapter in the conservative movement so unique. What was always a lightly-motivating long term danger – government bankruptcy from overgrowth – has become a short term possibility. The overwhelming majority are now motivated.
Still, inertia is on the side of more growth. Leaders of agencies build their budget proposals from reports from department heads in their agencies. In an agency, you are as important as your department is big, so everyone is trying to grow their department. The same is true of an agency on the whole. The same is true for schools. The same is true for every government activity.
With almost no counterweight, growth has been the incentive structure of government programs and agencies up until now.
We now have no choice but to turn the tide.
On cue, a tougher breed of conservative legislator is being elected all over the country. Governments must be made to justify spending – all spending.
Let the government prove it is efficient by serious cuts and restructuring.
Legislators manipulate taxpayers into thinking the burden of proof is on us to deny new revenues. It is the opposite. The burden is on legislators to prove to our satisfaction the need for revenues, and the burden is high. Our time in history demands it.
Ronald Reagan’s common sense conservatism was never more prescient than when he said that the only way to make a college kid spend less is to cut his allowance, and the same is true of governments.
Perhaps most important of all, people need to consider the danger of allowing grow-government leaders in a cut-government age.
Government growers want to conceal the need and possibility for government cuts. If they are eventually beaten – forced to cut – they want to make cuts as painful as possible in order to teach everyone that budget cuts are Hell.
Common sense believers in government efficiency must be in charge in this cut-government age, or we risk wasting it.
–Classic Ronald Reagan line on government cuts