Capitol Ideas / The Passing of the Buck
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas / The Passing of the Buck" To offer sympathy to a wrongdoer is an act of common decency; to return him to the House of Representatives is an act of frivolity bordering on the infantile. It is an indication of how far...
...The basic problem is that congressmen now find that they can take away a small amount of money per capita from the millions and use the money to deliver a handsome prize to the thousands...
...Reagan and his problematical Fordites aside, now may well be the by Tom B e t h e l l time to undertake a brief diagnosis of the state of the nation...
...The truth is that they will do no such thing...
...Indeed, I would go so far as to say that he has qualities of greatness rarely seen in the White House...
...it cannot, in its redistribution to the Third World make either foreigners wealthy or Americans admired...
...Federal spending really is quite seriously out of control, and we are looking next year at massive budget deficits and the subsequent alternative of a big new surge in inflation or very high interest rates and economic stagnation...
...The near-treasonous infiltration of the military by radical feminists, abetted of course by some of Carter's clowns, is the kind of thing we should be worrying about rather than planning missile race tracks in Utah...
...As was demonstrated in ancient Rome, when half the population finds that it can five at the expense of the other half, the country is in serious trouble...
...What of Reagan's prospects, as he begins to grapple with more problems and headaches than I would ever care to face...
...The presidency today has all the meteorological force of a weather vane, and so one fears that Reagan really won't be able to do a great deal with the elements...
...Congress has used the word "uncontrollable" to describe many of its spending programs, a rhetorical flourish intended to beat off spending cuts by fiscal conservatives...
...O t h e r s - - non-readers of The Congressional Record--imagine that it will be possible to cut government spending without first putting pressure on the spenders by cutting taxes...
...The first of these problems is often said to be the decline in our national defenses...
...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980...
...In the bad old days, one may recall, rich politicians were regularly accused of buying votes...
...In some cases, their shining goal is merely to balance the budget by allowing taxes to rise...
...The latest issue of the Public Interest has a good article pointing out some of the demoralizing effects of women in combat...
...Reagan should be severely on his guard against these people, who do not fully share his vision of America...
...America has had enough soap opera in the halls of government...
...Reagan himself is undoubtedly a man of sound instincts...
...One day Common Cause might actually oppose special interest legislation and abandon its tinkering with the campaign finance laws...
...it is to exacerbate them, because the addition of money to these ingredients of defeat only works to stifle the appearance of those spiritual qualities that alone can bring improvement...
...Today legislators can use the Treasury-that is, your money and mine --to buy the votes of their constituents by promising ever more of them ever enlarged transfer payments...
...Turning now to fiscal matters, our most worrisome problem, as it seems to me, arises out of "the power of the purse" and the uses to which it is now put...
...As was shown in the Cold War years, most liberals can live with big defense spending...
...The White House won't be able to do anything about the matter, for the simple reason that the White House doesn't have the power...
...Sizeable resources are wasted in the transfer, non-productive bureaucracies flourish, envy and resentment are inflamed, the recipients of welfare are demoralized, and the donors of it are discouraged from working harder...
...Congress has nowreaped the whirlwind...
...Alas, it has been shown over and over again that the attempt to push wealth into existence with money results only in the destruction of old wealth: Countries that receive foreign aid become poorer than they were before, as do the donors of that aid...
...On the other hand, the conscientious legislator who puts the good of the country first and votes against such redistributive schemes finds that the unappreciative millions will not counterbalance the irate "deprived" thousands...
...It is an indication of how far along we have come in releasing rogues from responsibility for their roguishness that they would even suggest drunkenriess as their alibi...
...It turns out that dollars provide us with a misleading, and often destructive, method of quantifying problems and their solutions...
...In the real world, the first phase of an economic sequence of events is the emergence of some quality of the human mind--whether it be hope or fear, faith or expectation...
...and finally, the inheritors of great wealth often find that the money in their bank accounts precludes the growth of aspiration and the other spiritual qualities needed to create something...
...it cannot impinge upon the needs of the needy, or create jobs for the unemployed...
...The more serious danger, both in relation to the military and all other national problems, is the ever-growing habit of thinking of solutions in terms of additional dollar expenditures...
...that the millions won't notice what is happening but that the thousands will be duly appreciative on election day...
...Federal dollars, raining down on inner city areas, "impact" (HUD's word) with about the same effect as high explosive bombs...
...All this, at bottom, is caused by the destructive belief that dollars can march forward into the vanguard of the political economy, where they can be relied upon to push aside all of our problems, unabetted by effort and labor...
...This no doubt seems a roundabout and abstract way of putting the matter, but it is this back-to-front perception of the relationship between money and the well-ordered society that is the most serious problem facing the new Reagan Administration...
...Return the melodrama to afternoon television, and return candidates like Myers, J e n r e t t e , and Bauman to private life where I shall gladly buy them all a drink and watch the fun...
...welfare recipients become impoverished by transfer payments, and soon become unable to get up on their hind legs to initiate effort...
...This mental prime mover in turn creates the incentive to work, which creates a job, which creates real wealth, which finally " p u l l s " into existence the "monetary equivalent of that weahh...
...In today's political economy, however, so many jobs exist only courtesy of the prior appropriation of money earned by someone else--government jobs and CETA jobs are examples--that the chain of economic events has finally come to be perceived in reverse in many people's minds: Money creates a "job," which in turn permits labor to be done, which in turn supposedly will create new wealth...
...What are the most serious problems facing the Reagan Administration...
...But I wonder if this is really as serious as some imagine...
...And for his pains he will be dubbed "uncompassionate" or "simplistic" or both by the nitwits of the press...
...To attempt to paper over these problems with money is not only to misdiagnose them...
...The government becomes universally distrusted, group is set warring against group, the individual begins to feel exposed: He too must join a collective if he is to survive...
...Legislation permitting an expropriation from the middle class to serve the alleged "needs" of minorities has been dubbed "special interest" legislation by Common Cause...
...Such a state of affairs is reflected today in Congress, which trotted off in October to reelect itself without so much as completing one appropriations measure or half completing the budget process for the fiscal year (1981) which had already begun...
...Money cannot improve the morale of the military...
...Less reassuring is the caliber of the people who are clustering around him...
...If, in the realm of domestic policy, we see Tom Bet/sell is The American Spectator's Washington editor and a Washington editor o f Harper's...
...If we THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 5 have a problem with the military it is almost certainly one of quality, not quantity...
...Well done, Governor...
...Here I confess to a tiny suspicion in the corner of my mind that it might have been more enjoyable to watch Carter continue to grapple with them...
...Nevertheless you would have needed a flashlight to find anything other than perfunctory comment on this in our great newspapers, hypnotized as they have been by the presidential race, and unwilling as they are to imply any criticism of the agenda of redistribution which is the root cause of the fiscal breakdown on Capitol Hill...
...THE PASSING OF THE BUCK Whatever the next four years may bring, we all surely owe Governor Reagan an immediate and heartfelt round of applause for bringing to an end Jimmy's dismal reign of Wimpery & Peanuttery...
...But at least they spent their own money...
...And to Jimmy Carter we bid Godspeed, as he embarks on what I suspect may turn out to be a preaching mission to the Third World, where he will have ample opportunity to experience at first hand the high esteem in which our nation is now held as a result of his policy of apology and accommodation...
...Money must be allowed to appear only at the end, never at the beginning of the chain of economic causation...
...it cannot revitalize dying industries, improve the quality of education, or reduce the rate of crime...
...nothing more imaginative than the trust that a repudiation o f tax cuts will permit revenues to catch up with spending, then inflation will soar and Ted Kennedy or another of the left-wing Democrats will be on the presidential reviewing stand in January 1985...
...morale, not hm-dware...
...As Thomas Ascik points out in an excellent analysis published recently by the Heritage Foundation, Congress this year has been delinquent in its duties to an extent unprecedented in the postwar era...
...In the first place, it seems to me that all those warhead and missile enumerations, comparative dollar/ruble expenditure totals, defense-as-percentage-of-GNP measures, and so on, mean very little, if anything...
...Meanwhile the nation will stagnate--the inevitable outcome of egalitarian redistribution...
...Put more bluntly, just as Carter's great problem turned out to be his total docility in the face of capture by the determined forces of George McGovern, who were disappointed in 1972 but victorious by proxy in 1976, so Ronald Reagan may well walk into the Oval Office firmly surrounded by a squad of Jerry Ford leftovers eager to take up where they left off four years ago...
...The great defect of income transfers is that they reduce economic life not merely to zero-sum, but actually to a minus-sum enterprise...
...Perhaps more important, even if there is a growing imbalance in the Soviets' favor, there is absolutelY, no constituency in this country for blocking a remedy to the situation...
...In fact they are condemned to lead lives of consumption, which is the first cousin of destruction...
Vol. 13 • December 1980 • No. 12
