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Imprimis, On Line -- October, 1992
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
360,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
institution known for its defense of free market
principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
For more information on free print subscriptions or
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ext. 2319.
------------------------------
"Why 'Good Government' Isn't Enough"
by Alan L. Keyes, Former U.N. Special Ambassador
and President,Citizens Against Government Waste
------------------------------
Volume 21, Number 10
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
October 1992
------------------------------
Preview: Why, despite all our efforts to reform
Congress, control spending, reduce taxes and pay off
the national debt, are we in worse shape than ever?
Alan Keyes argues that we have relied too much on
politicians and too little on our own initiative.
We need to restore stringent limits on Washington,
D.C. Two hundred years ago, the Founders knew that
government was a threat to liberty. Prophetically, they
warned future generations not to grow too dependent on
it.
Ambassador Keyes spoke at Shavano Institute for
National Leadership seminars last May in Cincinnati,
Ohio and this month in Pebble Beach, California. To
order audio or video tapes, please call 1-517-439-1524,
ext. 2319.
------------------------------
The national debt reached three trillion dollars in
March of 1990. But that wasn't all of the bad news:
experts predicted that within five months it would pass
the three and a half trillion mark. Think about that
for a moment: It took the entire history of our nation-
-over two centuries--for the debt to reach three
trillion dollars and five months later we were told we
could expect an increase of another half trillion. In
1992, the debt will reach four trillion dollars.
How the Debt Adds Up:
A Billion Here, a Billion There
Can you recall how a rocket shimmers as it leaves the
ground and then starts to streak into the sky so fast
that it is impossible to follow with the naked eye?
Well, that is our national debt. It is well past the
shimmering stage, and it is streaking out of sight.
Americans have every right to be frightened and angry
about this. The debt is not an abstraction. It is real,
just like a rocket. But our politicians have been
dealing with big numbers for so long that they seem to
have forgotten. It is nothing for them to routinely
round off numbers to the nearest million or billion
dollars.
I know this from personal experience. I once had a
lowly position at the State Department as assistant
secretary for international organizations. My office
dealt with the U.S. contribution to the United Nations
and, as this amounted to something less than a billion
dollars a year, it was regarded as a drop in the
bucket. We simply did not enter upon the radar screen
of serious government. Nonetheless, the higher-ups
tried to make it easy, so by the time budget and
accounting memos got to us, thousands of dollars and
very often tens of thousands of dollars would have
disappeared from sight in the rounding-off process.
This is the rule for virtually all federal
agencies and departments. Collectively, they deal every
day in hundreds of billions of dollars. So they are not
rounding off just thousands and tens of thousands; they
are rounding off tens of billions of dollars. The
people in individual offices who are making budget
decisions never see the missing figures, and in truth
they never think about them much.
In this context it becomes very easy to forget
that a "hundred" in the memo you're reading represents
a hundred million. Why, that's not even one billion,
you might say once you had been in Washington awhile.
You get into that habit. And it is a habit that reveals
a great deal about the transformation that takes place
when an individual spends a lot of time working in and
around the federal government.
But most voters think, "Ah, if only we could send
really good people to Washington, they won't develop
those habits. And then, finally, we'll have good
government." It is true that sending good people to
Washington is essential to good government. I do not
for one moment want to minimize the importance of this.
But neither good people nor "good government" are
enough. We send good people to Washington all the time,
and they hail from every state in the Union. They are
competent, successful people loaded with integrity,
courage and common sense (at least before they get to
our nation's capital). We have even had "good
government" as it is defined by those in
government. Why, then, is Washington such a mess?
Out-of-Control Spending
and Entitlements
One obvious reason is the sheer size of the federal
budget. In January of 1992, President Bush unveiled his
proposed budget for the 1993 fiscal year. As the Wall
Street Journal noted, the Democrats in Congress
pronounced it "dead on arrival." It was just too low.
What was low to them? The total (rounded, of course, to
the nearest hundred million dollars) was
$1,516,700,000,000--one trillion, five hundred sixteen
billion, seven hundred million dollars. That is more
than 25 percent of the nation's GNP.
And what about off-budget entitlements, the monies
the federal government is already committed to spend
but that the public never hears about? These amount to
$4-6 trillion in civil and military pensions, Social
Security payments and other unfunded liabilities.
Regulation and Taxes:
The Power to Destroy
But that is not all. Government regulation is another
kind of hidden expenditure that never shows up in any
proposed budget. The National Chamber Foundation
reported in mid-1992 that regulatory costs passed along
to the consumer in the form of higher prices total $400
billion each year, or an average of $4000 per
household.
As if that weren't enough, direct taxation, added
to Social Security payroll deductions for employers and
employees, is now a staggering 52-60 percent of the
GNP. These figures were virtually ensured in 1990 when
President Bush retreated from his personal tax pledge
and cooperated with Congress to pass a so-called
"deficit reduction package." The price was $200 billion
(to date) in new tax increases. The outraged American
public was assured that these would be solely devoted
to reducing the deficit and that there would be
significant spending cuts at all levels.
But many people were skeptical. I, for one, wrote
at the time that the more we heard them talk about
deficit reduction in Washington, the less of it we
should expect to see. Words are a distraction from
deeds in Washington. And the skepticism proved to be
well founded. Congress slid out from under the Gramm
Rudman deficit reduction law and ever since has been
producing the largest deficits in American history:
$280 billion in 1991 and $400 billion in 1992.
One of the interesting sidebars to this story involves
the "luxury tax" which was a minor part of the deficit
reduction package. This new tax ended up literally
crippling the boat-building industry. It also led to
massive layoffs, putting more than thirty thousand
people on the unemployment rolls, and adversely
affected dozens of other related industries.
Ironically, the luxury tax proved to cost more money
than it raised in tax revenues. It should remind us
that the power to tax is the power to destroy.
Government Waste
Then there is the huge problem of government waste. In
1990, the Comptroller General of the General Accounting
Office estimated that the federal government wastes
$180 billion annually. At the time, this was enough
money to fund the state budgets of forty-eight out of
the fifty states. And, since the GAO only watches what
Congress tells it to watch, we can only imagine the
waste that goes unreported.
Here is one example uncovered by Citizens Against
Government Waste. The U.S. Navy regularly sinks old
ships in its artificial-reef-and-sink program.
Thousands of items are left on board, from mattresses,
pots and pans to heavy equipment and machinery. A
congressman wrote to the Navy Department sensibly
pointing out that these could be salvaged. The Navy
replied loftily that the $57 million involved didn't
justify the effort. It makes you wonder: What amount
would justify the effort? A hundred million dollars?
Apparently not at the Defense Department's
Logistics Agency, which spent $250 million putting in
an elaborate computer system that was supposed to help
it keep track of its purchases and prevent it from
acquiring unneeded inventory. But, according to a GAO
survey, it ended up purchasing $3.5 billion in unneeded
inventory anyway, including a thirty-three year supply
of size 12 women's blouses. (We couldn't have begun to
use up that supply of blouses even if all of the
service personnel that we had sent to the Persian Gulf
had been women who wore size 12.)
It's Our Money
This kind of story seems pretty funny, until you
remember whose money is going to waste. I was doing a
radio interview recently when a listener called in to
complain about the savings and loan scandal. He went on
for five minutes about what an awful travesty it was.
Every now and again I would mutter encouragingly so
that he would realize that I was a receptive audience.
Finally, he concluded by saying that the one thing he
really didn't understand was why "we, the American
taxpayers, have to foot the bill. Why don't we just let
government do it?"
It's our money, whether it is tens of billions
that will be spent on bailing out savings and loans, or
$57 million wasted by the Navy, or $3.5 billion in
unneeded Defense Department inventory. But we--and
those good people we keep on sending to Washington--
have made the same mistake as the radio caller. Time
and time again, we have been content to "let the
government do it."
Think about what our money is. Our money is our
children's education. It is the roof over our heads. It
is the ability to think ahead to years into the future,
to plan what we might do, for ourselves, our children,
our community and our nation. It allows us to feel both
the burden and the privilege of responsibility. Our
money is the basis of our ability to translate our
will, our choices and our values into action. In a real
sense, it is the foundation of self government and of a
free society. And the more that our money is removed
from our control, the less responsibility we exercise,
the less freedom we enjoy.
It is not that we send bad people to Washington
who are doing bad things. True, there are some who are
abusing their positions, but most are simply using them
in ways that come perfectly naturally. We put them in a
system where success depends not upon the results
produced but upon how much money is controlled and how
many people are commanded, so we shouldn't be surprised
that their greatest interest in life is controlling
more money and commanding more people.
Nor should we be surprised that they help maintain
the very network of political and bureaucratic
patronage that they were elected to fight. They try
their hardest not to roll back big government, but to
"make it work." In short, our congressmen and senators
are no longer our representatives; they are sales
agents for "good government," i.e., government with
ever-expanding power over the lives of you and me and
our children.
The Flawed Nature of Government
The disjunction of interest between us and the people
we send to Washington doesn't arise because of one
particular circumstance. It has become endemic to the
system. Even if all the problems I have outlined were
solved, we still cannot elect good people, send them
off to Washington and expect them to do good things for
us.
America's Founders warned as much. At the
Constitutional Convention in 1787, annual elections
were seriously considered as one possible method of
keeping a tight rein on the nation's representatives,
and at the time most states handled their own elections
this way. The attitude was: "We must keep a constant
and watchful eye on our representatives and curb the
worst excesses of government." It was not: "Once we
elect worthy public servants, we will trust them to do
good things with government."
The Founders knew that, worthy public servants
aside, government by nature tends toward excess. It is
a necessary evil to provide for the common defense, to
promote the general welfare, to do those things as
President Lincoln later said that cannot be done by
individuals and enterprises singly. There may be times
when we have to use this instrument, just as doctors
were once wont to include small amounts of arsenic in
their prescriptions, but massive doses can be fatal.
And, whatever may be our good impulses as a
people, those impulses alone are incapable of
controlling the fundamental tendency of government
toward excess and abuse. Contrary to what another
President, Jimmy Carter, promised, we shall never have
a government that is as good as its people, and we
should never wish for one.
What is self government about, after all? What is
this society about? They certainly are not about
producing a utopia through the instrument of the state.
Even if government could produce all that it promises,
we would not want those results on the terms they are
offered. They are terms that require that we surrender
a good that is more important than good results: our
freedom to make choices. We should still have enough
pride in ourselves as individuals and as a people to
want to shape our own destiny.
The Return to Individual
and Local Responsibility
As citizens empowered to govern ourselves we should
also be willing to reassert our role on a community
level. And it is high time we did so. In the course of
the last fifty years there has not been one new local
government incorporated in the United States. The life
blood of this system is drying up.
When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about America in
the 1830s, he tried to explain what he thought was
responsible for its astounding success. One of the key
factors he pointed to was the vitality and primacy of
government at the local level. Government at the local
level is the intersection between private enterprise
and government power--where the latter remains to some
degree answerable to the former. At the state and
federal levels the primary interest of government is
government. The people become merely the servants of
its appetites.
We must return as much power as possible to
individuals and to local government. For starters, we
need term limitations and a properly worded and
conceived balanced budget amendment. (It is not enough
to tell Congress that it must balance the budget. Left
to its own devices, Congress will balance the budget on
the backs of the taxpayers and/or by creating more and
more off-budget entitlements and regulations.)
And we citizens have to become our own watchdogs
once more. We need taxpayer commissions to give
critical scrutiny to the reports of government watchdog
agencies like the GAO and to do some investigating of
their own. (Right now, we are spending millions of
dollars on reports that tell us how the government is
wasting our money when those reports themselves are a
primary example of waste because nothing is done about
them, or because they are deliberately slanted to
please the agencies and departments they are
evaluating.)
We also have to hold government accountable for
spending our money. Politicians and bureaucrats talk a
lot about "government resources," but they are ours.
Like greedy guests sponging off their host in a swank
restaurant, they are reading off a menu with no prices
when they plan new budgets and new programs. But we are
the host. We foot the bill. We need to insist on seeing
all the prices up front.
Revitalizing local government, term limitation,
taxpayer commissions, fiscal accountability--these are
practical and realizable goals. But there is nothing
that can be done to reform the system that will
substitute for the grass-roots mobilization of people
around the country. For our government is "of the
people, by the people and for the people," and we must
not let it perish.
------------------------------
Alan L. Keyes has served as assistant secretary of
state, U.S. vice consul in India, resident scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute, interim president at
Alabama A & M University, consultant to the National
Security Council, special ambassador to the United
Nations Economic and Social Council, and president of
Citizens Against Government Waste. A Harvard Ph.D., he
has written for the Wall Street Journal, Policy Review
and other publications and is at work on two books, the
first on self government and the second on diplomacy
and strategic thinking. Currently, he is a candidate
for the U.S. Senate in Maryland.
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