Washington: Too Big to Succeed

By Lawrence W. Reed, Foundation for Economic Education

In 1890, Americans were outraged that their House of Representatives in Washington spent a record billion dollars in just two years’ time. They punished the “Billion Dollar Congress” in the elections that year by making the majority party the minority party, cutting its roster in the House by more than 90 seats.

Think about that. The American people were mad as wet hens because Congress spent half a billion dollars in twelve months and then another half billion again the very next year. But the lawmakers of 1890 were skinflints compared to the porkers in Washington these days.

Since Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the Congress has spent a full billion dollars every single hour!

Today the numbers are mind-numbing, to be sure — so much so that most members of Congress don’t even bother to read the appropriations bills they pass. Let me numb your mind a little more before trying to make some sense of it all:

Before President Obama’s term is half over, federal spending will have doubled in just a decade.  And it’s not a surplus of revenues that they’re spending. Indeed, the deficit in a single year’s budget is now as large as the entire budget in George W. Bush’s first year as president, 2001. The flood of red ink is adding to the national debt to the tune of about $4 billion every day. At more than $11 trillion, that debt amounts to $36,000 for every living American.

Certain private firms are widely believed to be “too big to fail.” So we’re in the process of handing big chunks of them over to the government. Companies that lose billions are being told what to do by an outfit that loses trillions.

The question we all should be asking ourselves is this: Are we trusting our economy and our lives to a government that is too big to succeed?

Once upon a time in America, most citizens expected government to keep the peace and otherwise leave them alone. We built a vibrant, self-reliant, entrepreneurial culture with strong families and solid values. We respected property and largely kept the spirit of the 8th and 10th Commandments against coveting and stealing. We understood that government didn’t have anything to give anybody except what it first took from somebody, and that a government big enough to give us everything we want would be big enough to take away everything we’ve got. We practiced fiscal discipline in our personal lives and we expected nothing less from the people in the government we elected, or we threw them out.

Somewhere along the way, we lost our moral compass. And just like the Roman Republic that rose on integrity and collapsed in turpitude, we thought the “bread and circuses” the government could provide us would buy us comfort and security.

We gave the government the responsibility to educate our children, though government can never be counted on to teach either liberty or character or just about anything very well, for that matter. We asked the government to give us health care, welfare, old age pensions, college education, farm subsidies and now our politicians are bankrupting the country to pay the bills. This welfare state of ours has become one big circle of 305 million people, each with his hands in the next fellow’s pocket.

This is a government whose reach even before the financial crisis scarcely left an aspect of American life untouched, from the cradle to the grave and the volume of our toilet bowl water in between. As a portion of our personal income, its tax and regulatory burden consumes at least five times what it did just a century ago. But to the majority on the Potomac, government is nowhere yet big enough.

Remember In Search of Excellence, the 1982 bestselling management book by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman? One of its salient points is that an organization gets off track when it no longer “sticks to the knitting.” When it allows its mission to blur and be stretched far beyond its founding design, when it becomes distracted by endless and dubious new responsibilities, its core competency evaporates. It will fail to do what it is supposed to do, because it’s doing too much of what it’s not supposed to do.

It may come as a surprise to those who see aspirin made in Washington as the cure for every ailment, but the federal government is not God. It can’t even be a good Santa Claus because it can’t give anybody anything that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. It’s no Mother Theresa either, because on those occasions when it does some good it usually costs an arm and a leg and sends a big part of the bill to generations yet unborn. The fact is, the bigger government gets, the more it starts to look like Moe, Larry and Curly.

Americans can’t expect government to do virtually everything for them and do it well. They can’t have their proverbial cake and inhale it too; to assume otherwise is infantile, fairyland thinking.

I am not worried that General Motors may be too big to fail. I am infinitely more concerned that every man, woman and child in America is becoming hogtied to the fortunes of a monster that is far too big to succeed.

Lawrence W. Reed holds a B.A. in economics and an M.A. in history and is a former chairman of the Department of Economics at Northwood University.  He is now the president of the Foundation for Economic Education and president emeritus of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.