Truth and Gov

By Crispin Sartwell

According to the Washinton Post, by the time the 2003 federal budget is submitted, the Bush administration will have completed the biggest leap in spending in almost forty years.

Now perhaps you recall Bush, in his basic "it's-time-for-them-to-go" stump speech, saying that the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties was that the Dems believed that your money belonged to them, while the Reps believed it belongs to you. But to be completely honest about it, no one but you actually believes your money belongs to you. And you could be jiving too.

Anyway, obviously, the Bush administration has faced some pretty extraordinary circumstances and has increased defense and "homeland security" spending. What you might not expect is that they've also increased spending on education.

Between 1999 and 2003, the federal government's spending as a percentage of the economy will have increased from 16.6% to 18.5%. But the truth of the matter is that federal spending essentially never goes down, even in eras of severe recession and military demobilization. With a few little hitches, federal spending as a portion of the economy has increased every year since the Constitution was implemented.

By most accountings, the Reagan administration did not actually reduce the size of government, though it slowed the pace of its growth.

Let me explain why gov always grows by an analogy. All my adult life, I have observed the operation of academic politics, as university professors and departments wrestle over who's gonna get what in this year's budget. Every department chair I have met in these decades has believed with evident sincerity that his or her own little topic was the absolute most essential aspect of every student's education, and therefore that all possible monies, positions and so on must pour down upon his department like a spring rain.

No budget has ever shrunk voluntarily, because the budget of every segment of the organization is given into someone's care to defend and increase. This year's budget proposal always represents an increase from last year's.

However, the actual budgets of several of the departments I've observed have been reduced, because maybe someone pointed out that the departments weren't generating much interest, or maybe the university just decided to go in another direction (usually a massive investment in computers), or because enrollments decreased. The budgets shrank, often, because the overall organization shrank.

Now I have a proposal: arm department chairs and university presidents. Authorize them to expropriate all the money they need from wherever they like. You will have on your hands a hydra of a university, one that will grow in perpetuity until essentially there's nothing left outside the u.

This is the position of the United States government: its police power and its power to tax are the same, and are unlimited. No one is in position to keep the federal government from raising all the money they want. The upper end of the budget has no fixture. Indeed, the government is the only organization that has that power, because it is the only organization with the military power to enforce its cash flow.

Once someone heads a department, it essentially does not matter whether they're budget-cutting Reps or budget-busting Dems: they figure out that what they're doing is important and that there is no upper limit to the money they might do it with. So they beg, plead, and howl.

And indeed, much of what the government does is admirable: who can set themselves squarely against feeding the poor or educating the children?

Nevertheless, as you argue for more funding for whatever worthy cause you have made your own, you might ponder the fact that you have entered the infinite circular logic of absolutism, according to which the government and the economy, the government and charity, the government and art, the government and food, the government and learning, the government and truth, the government and love, are all exactly the same thing.

18.5% is only the beginning.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Contact him through www.crispinsartwell.com