Every dime taken out of the private sector and placed in government’s hands is a net loss for efficiency, especially for a nation with a federal government already deep in debt. That means a government “shutdown” like the one threatened this week if Congress doesn’t pass a budget is no significant danger—in practice, it’s never anything more than a mild, brief, partial shutdown.
That means no major political faction is pushing as hard as it should for budget cuts. Don’t let profligate liberals, establishment conservatives, and passive, conflict-averse Trump convince you otherwise as they urge signing off on a business-as-usual Continuing Resolution for another six months of big-government big spending.
To begin with my own faction, libertarians—for current purposes defined broadly enough to include the ones willing to hold their noses and vote or even, like Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, hold office—should never frighten away the non-libertarians by making it sound as if the budget cuts under consideration at a given time are large or decisive. Massie knows the cuts talked about this week are dinky and at best symbolic, and Trump’s response has basically been to tell him to shut up and vote for the new budget anyway. Trump thinks socialists are the nation’s biggest losers—until a Republican wants less spending than Trump, at which point a loser, in Trump’s narcissistic cosmology, is simply anyone who disagrees with Trump.
The six-month non-defense spending bill that most of Massie’s fellow House Republicans, but not the comparatively noble members of the House Freedom Caucus, want to pass—largely on party lines despite Democratic demands for more—would only cut about 1/300th of the federal budget, depending on how you do the counting. Yet already, we’re told by the Democrats that Grandma is being mercilessly thrown into the street with D.O.G.E. gnawing at her skinny carcass, while Trump and his most loyal Republicans dismiss calls for deeper cuts and merely say, “Get onboard, gotta get legislative business done.”
Meanwhile, despite D.O.G.E. having virtually no discernible real-world effect on this bloated spending bill, various lawyerly and academic establishment libertarians are already wracked with left-liberal-style guilt over whether (hyper-cautious) proper procedures are being followed for reviewing and possibly someday ending budget items in this imagined crazy go-go rushed anarchist Musk-as-consultant era. But there’s almost no wrong way to cut the monstrous, obscene tumor that’s government spending, and real libertarians, as well as math buffs in general, should know that.
And this is certainly no time to do a disgruntled about-face and pretend the Democrats are the responsible ones on budgeting. They created most of this mess, and now someone has to destroy it.
But cowardly nibbling at the ever-growing mass that is government is all you get, even when you vote for revolutionary change in DC—as people who lived through the Reagan “Revolution” and the Gingrich “Revolution” know well. The first of those revolutions cut almost nothing despite liberals’ screams to the contrary, and the second temporarily cut about one percent—all while society has grown vastly more prosperous and thus in theory capable of fending for itself without government nannies.
And contrary to branding, “fiscally conservative” outfits like The Wall Street Journal aren’t going to be much help. Everyone’s pet project becomes an excuse to throw in the towel on spending, and the Journal crowd loves the military, which by now you should’ve noticed is expensive. No sooner does Trump threaten, whether for reasons noble or venal, to cut off funding for the war in Ukraine than the Journal, by an astonishing coincidence, notices and reports on DNA evidence that Ukraine is, and has always been, the true cradle of civilization. What are the odds?
I’m reminded of that time in the late-1990s when Bill Clinton’s presidency was imperiled by him lying to a grand jury about his adultery and a prominent science journal just happened to publish research showing that young people don’t really consider oral sex to be sex. A generation later, the young don’t even consider genitals relevant for designating one’s sex, let alone having sex, so I won’t pretend to be jargon czar here; I was just struck by the science publication’s timing. But believe the science, accept the political ramifications, etc.!
Look at what a chore it has been just getting ostensible fiscal conservatives to sign off on gutting USAID, likely because so much of that agency’s spending flows back into the coffers of the right-beloved defense industry—and Israeli projects (that non-poor nation notoriously being the biggest recipient of U.S. “foreign aid,” to the tune of about $300 billion over the past half-century, beset though it undeniably is by foes from Columbia to Paterson, NJ). End it all.
But left-liberal psychopaths, the faction who most strenuously defend government spending, would have us believe that it’s cruelty to lay off the government employees who live off the American taxpayer, even though each such cut alleviates the burden on that oppressed taxpayer. This is a complete moral inversion, and the socialistic intellectuals who abet the ludicrous “cruelty to government employees” narrative are little better than craven henchman Renfield singing the praises of his master, Count Dracula.
When they tell sob stories about government employees being laid off—or merely worrying for roughly the first time in history that they might be laid off—do the reporters at NBC want readers and viewers to assume government workers, rather like Old World aristocrats, simply matter more than the people at whose expense they live? Apparently, organizations such as NBC mainly exist to do P.R. for big government, as right-leaning critics allege. Gone are the days of liberal reporters striving to find poor people and cool science projects that might vanish in the unlikely event the budget gets cut. Now the media think simply pointing at the bored, inactive government workers themselves will evoke pity from hard-working Americans. By all means continue this rhetorical tack, left-liberals! Let the self-serving nature of government’s pleas be on display for all to see.
Yet a turn to the right won’t necessarily help. If some paleo-populist such as J.D. Vance—with his lamentations about rural layoffs—is indicative of the future tone of the Republican Party, or just Trump with his economically-ignorant claims about Americans being hurt by trade, it’ll be child’s play for the defenders of government to make it sound as if every cut to every part of the budget is cruel and painful, whether the pity-evoking victim of cuts is a ghetto resident or a hillbilly. That’s great news for trough-feeding politicians. But the truth is inherently-inefficient government hurts, all the time, not the rare cuts.
Economist Frederic Bastiat noted back in the 19th century that the key to anti-market, pro-government propaganda is always to get people to look only at the benefits you want them to see and only at the costs you want them to see. If government builds a bridge, it’ll try to preempt people thinking about the homes and stores that money might have created had it remained in private hands. Likewise, on cue, leftists and media—and now half the conservatives to boot—notice when factories close but don’t notice when goods flow freely thanks to the absence of taxes and regulations.
If you want to be intellectually honest, you shouldn’t just gaze at the parts of the ledger that suit your current analysis/agenda and avoid noticing the parts that don’t—or worse, deliberately mislead others into not noticing, which is the main hobby of all of these budget-defending bozos from Congress to Alternet, and from Lockheed Martin to The New York Times. Give America its money back.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey