Extra dollars come from two places:
- Specialization. Michael Jordan would be better off hiring a neighborhood kid to mow his lawn, even if he’s better at it. He shouldn’t do everything for himself; he should concentrate on things that he’s exceptional at. (This is called comparative advantage.) Similarly, you’re better off doing whatever you do than, say, inspecting your meat or ensuring the pills you’re buying from the drugstore are actually the pills they said you were getting.
- Trade. When I was a kid, I wondered why cave men had so little and we have so much. It seems like magic. Where did it all come from? It’s because when I sell you some corn I grew, it’s a better than even trade. I value the money you give me more than I value having the corn. But you value the corn more than the money. We both win.
Now, for most things, markets work best. But for some, they don’t. For example, markets have negative externalities. A polluting company costs people downwind to suffer, but there’s usually no way for those people to present the company with a bill. They could band together, storm the factory, and burn it down, but it seems to work better overall if they create a government that can pass and enforce laws either regulating the pollution or requiring compensation.
You, ideally, are paying the government $X to get things you value more than the $X, just as if it were selling corn. The complicating thing is the only way to get a government worth paying (one that, when it comes down to it, has the guns to enforce the laws) is to band together with a bunch of other people who value different things in different ways. For the mythical average person, this is less efficient than if the factory just wouldn’t pollute, and more efficient than everyone having to suck it up and live with rotten air. But for someone who doesn’t live near the factory, it seems crazy to pay government to get the factory to stop polluting - unless you’re sure that it’s fair: that the government’s doing something good for you that someone living downwind of the factory doesn’t care about. And it’s also something of a gamble: some people are just going to flat-out lose on average, across the board, on all the issues they care about. You just have to wonder whether it’d be a better gamble that a radically reduced government wouldn’t end up like 1890’s USA, which was pretty unpleasant for average people, certainly in comparison to today.
The Republican Party’s current approach is to engineer the mindset that:
- You, personally, are losing.
- There is an easily identifiable group of people (*them*, the people who aren’t real Americans, those shiftless unemployed) who (a) are getting more than they deserve and (b) don’t have much political power, so…
- The money being spent on *them* should be taken away. Once that happens, it’ll be spent on you, or left in your hands.
I’m kind of dubious about all three. I prefer a conservative approach of being cautious about changing what’s working OK. Since WWII, people in the USA have gotten remarkably well off. The middle class, in particular, was practically *created* by government programs: the GI Bill, VA loans, huge expansion in availability of college, the Interstate Highway System, etc. We could be doing a lot worse. I’m pretty sure we will be.
