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24.04.2002, 21:46

Bush Swells the State / Artikel, engl. (mit einer großen Lücke: scrollen)

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http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=939
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Bush Swells the State
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by Jeffrey Tucker

[Posted April 24, 2002]

as
might be expected, is all for it too.)

What, some libertarians ask, is the point of
government if not to bomb those who would threaten our safety? The trouble is
that real life works a little differently from the civics-text ideal of
government. Government uses war--and sometimes foments it--in order to expand
its power over its own people and/or to expand its imperial reach, even as it
prohibits private-sector efforts that might actually bring about more security
(in this case, armed pilots).

"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war
is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded," wrote James Madison,"because it
comprises and develops the germ of every other.""No nation could
preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare," he said. This is
why, wrote John Quincy Adams, that"America goes not abroad in search of
monsters to destroy."

That?s also why the founders tried to make it
very difficult for the U.S. government to go to war, giving the president no
autonomous power to do so--restrictions routinely ignored today. On the
ideological level, the founders warned constantly against entangling alliances
and urged only commercial ties with the world. Peace and free trade: a
public-policy combination all but absent in current debate.

But enough of theory and history. Look at the
current reality. Bin Laden is still at large, and airlines are still prohibited
from securing their property from hijack threats, but big government is growing
at rates not seen since Lyndon Johnson?s time.

The Bush administration is engaged in an
incredibly dangerous spending spree, beyond that which the Republicans would
ever tolerate if undertaken by a Democrat. If it took a Nixon to go to China, it
takes a Bush to manufacture annual double-digit wealth transfers from the
private to public sector, much of which is being spent on foreign aid, domestic
surveillance, public-private partnerships, and the construction of ever more
weapons of mass destruction--all of which are being paid for through debt and
inflation and creating a Keynesian-style?recovery.?

From October 2001 to March 2002, federal outlays
were up by $60 billion over the same period the previous year. In
this time period, the federal government, the one we all learned to love so much,
has somehow managed to burn through fully $1 trillion in wealth formerly own by
the private sector. As for revenue, it is down from last year by $44
billion, netting a deficit of $129 billion. All told, annual government spending
is growing right now at an astonishing 8 percent rate. (All this data comes from
the latest reports from the Congressional Budget Office.)

[img]" alt="[image]" style="margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px" /> 

<div align="left">
Taking a broader look, spending on government
programs from 1999 to 2003 will have increased 22 percent (in inflation
adjusted dollars), according a new analysis by the Washington Post.
Measured against the GDP, total federal spending will soar to 18.5 percent in
these three years. Spending rose 9 percent in the last two years of the
Clinton presidency but will rise 15 percent in the first two years of the Bush
administration. If Clinton was a social democrat in love with big government,
what does that make Bush?
</div>

In fact, President Bush?s budget proposals call
for spending increases that make Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon look
like fiscal conservatives. Not since Johnson launched his combination of the
Great Society and the Vietnam War has federal spending going up at this rate.
The explosive increases not only cover defense spending but also affect the
entire apparatus of the domestic welfare state, from education to unemployment
payments to Medicare. The welfare and warfare states serve different
constituents but political logrolling and intricate games of quid pro quo insure
that both groups can enjoy the loot.



 
<table width="33%" align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td> [image] </td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

This spending is only the beginning. These
figures do not include propose spending increases after 2003, which dwarf any
proposals made before last year. During the stimulus debate, no Democrat dared
suggest spending near this level. If Bush had been elected on the Socialist
Party ticket, this is just about the kind of behavior we would expect (and yet
the socialists would have been squeamish).

Among the most odious of single ticket items is
the $500 million that the Bush administration is planning to spend on rebuilding
the destruction wrought by expensive U.S. bombs on Afghanistan (millions of
which have already been wasted). This destroy-and-build spending has become a
regular feature of U.S. foreign policy since the Marshall Plan, when business
connected to government discovered that the postwar cleanup can be a fast-track
to doing good and doing well. And yet the new president of Afghanistan is
weirdly complaining that it is not enough that a failure to give more could
revive terrorism emanating from his country, which makes one wonder if this is a
promise or a threat.

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Inevitably, of course, Congress sees the main
chance here and plans to not only give Bush what he wants but add to it with
the usual litany of domestic baloney designed to channel tax dollars to the
biggest campaign donors. Bush is preparing to rally his part supporters by
denouncing Congress?s bigger spending plans as an unwarranted increase in
big government. Meanwhile, revenue is down and Bush is calling for tax cuts,
which means more pressure on the Fed to fund this spending through inflation.
</div>

And no effort whatsoever is being made to
demonstrate that any of this spending is actually necessary (the US is already
in an arms race against itself) or will actually accomplish what it is supposed
to accomplish. And no means are in place to reverse course, much less refund the
money, once the spending spree proves fruitless for public purposes. The
main mode of government is to take as much as it can get away with, and spend as
much as possible. In the US, the government has been effective in citing
military needs as a justification:
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</div>

<div>
 
</div>
<div align="center">
<table align="center" border="3">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Selected Countries</th>
<th>Military Budget</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>United States</td>
<td>$396,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Russia</td>
<td>    60,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>China</td>
<td>    42,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Japan </td>
<td>    40,400,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>United Kingdom </td>
<td>    34,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Saudi Arabia </td>
<td>    27,200,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>France </td>
<td>    25,300,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Germany </td>
<td>    21,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Brazil* </td>
<td>    17,900,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India </td>
<td>    15,600,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Italy </td>
<td>    15,500,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>South Korea </td>
<td>    11,800,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Iran </td>
<td>     
9,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Israel </td>
<td>     
9,000,000,000</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Taiwan </td>
<td>     
8,200,000,000</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>

The spending side of the equation underestates
the problem because it doesn't reflect the increased power of government
law-enforcement agencies. The threat to civil liberties is growing by the
day. The war has been used to justify egregious forms of new protectionism on
steel and lumber, adding to already existing trade barriers that are raising
prices on the American consumer. All the old problems of regulation and social
engineering have been tabled or even made worse for the duration of the war.

We have new agencies in place promising to do
what the old agencies did not and could not do. Will normalcy return after the
war is over (if it ever ends)? Not if the partisans of power get their way. As
Mises wrote in 1919:?From the beginning the intention prevailed in all
socialist groups of dropping none of the measures adopted during the war after
the war but rather of advancing on the way toward the completion of socalism.?

Back in October, <ST2:PERSONNAME>
<ST1:GIVENNAME>
Jonah</ST1:GIVENNAME>
 <ST1:SN>
Goldberg</ST1:SN>
</ST2:PERSONNAME>
 wrote:?The libertarians are right when they say that war fuels big
government. But it doesn't have to be that way.? Whether it has to be or not,
the fact is that it is happening, and neither <ST1:SN>
Goldberg</ST1:SN>
 nor any of his compatriots seem to care. They find wartime too
exhilarating to bother much with concerns about freedom, constitutional
government, and other philosophical matters that kept them up late in college. 

This is hardly the first time that a war has
fueled the growth of Leviathan. <ST1:SN>
<ST2:CITY>
<ST2:PLACE>
Clinton</ST2:PLACE>
</ST2:CITY>
</ST1:SN>
 never had it better than when he was fighting some far-flung war somewhere.
The same goes for all his predecessors. Government rides high during war, and
the costs are rarely spoke of at all, especially not from the Republicans whose
one-time devotion to small government has mutated into a promiscuous love affair
with the welfare-warfare state. 

Now, in all the commentary on this amazing budget
debacle, people speak as if the decision to spend 10 or 20 percent more this
year than last is purely a matter of governmental discretion, as if the only
limit to government expansion should be the good will of the political class.
There was a time when this was not the case. The Constitution once restricted
power. The federal government couldn?t tax individuals directly. It couldn?t
inflate the dollar because we were on a gold standard. There was no central bank
that could print whatever the government wanted to spend. 

What restricts government power today? For the
most part, it is public opinion. That?s where libertarians and conservatives
can play an important role in drawing attention to the lies of government, the
dangers to liberty that war brings with it, and the real aims of the political
class. Not to do that, and to instead celebrate the largest expansion of
government in the lifetimes of anyone under 36, is to betray a kind of public
trust. It is to discredit every slogan about?limited government? that has
been advertised by pressure groups for decades. It?s one thing for the
Republicans in office to do that. But why should intellectuals go along? 

The meltdown of liberty can be stopped. But it
won?t be stopped until those who understand the problem speak out courageously
against the clear and present danger, the state at war. It is a danger even if
the state wins. As Mises says:?no citizen of a liberal and democratic nation
profits from a victorious war.?


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<ST2:PERSONNAME>
<ST1:GIVENNAME>
Jeffrey</ST1:GIVENNAME>
 <ST1:SN>
Tucker</ST1:SN>
</ST2:PERSONNAME>
 is vice president of the Mises Institute. Send him MAIL and
see his Mises.org Articles
Archive. The Center
for Defense Information is the source of the
country-by-country comparison.



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