Representative Bobby Scott held a Townhall meeting in Norfolk, VA yesterday evening that focused on the economic future of the United States, but more specifically toward the Hampton Roads area.
The Democrat’s position is that any talk of deficit reduction will have a “significant” impact on job creation and retention among his constituency. This is actually true for most of Virginia, Maryland, and any location where the structure and industry of bureaucratic systematism has entrenched itself through decades of natural growth, by virtue of its proximity to the central bureaucratic hub in Washington, DC.
In the Hampton Roads area, however, most of the federal government spending is directed toward the one area of the budget that Republicans are hesitant to decrease: defense. It has been the theme of his party, rather, to cut the largest federal expenditure in his district.
It is not my intent to argue the wisdom of cutting portions of defense; but that aside, The Commonwealth Institute presented a statistic that showed 45% of all income in Virginia is received directly from the federal government, whether through wages, entitlements, or pensions. (Let us, for the sake of argument, accept this statistic, despite its source.) Naturally, any large-scale cuts in federal spending potentially reduces the availability of these funds, at this percentage, for Virginians.
The short-term and emotional question in response to this may be, “How shall we keep these federal payments at current levels?” As long as Rep. Scott and the Institute demonstrate convincingly that spending cuts will affect personal income, Virginians will ask this question. No one wants to see their income drop arbitrarily. It is one thing to receive a salary-cut based on poor performance, but it is quite another to receive one based on the corporation’s fiscal mismanagement.
Truly, the federal corporation must reduce its expenditures based on the latter. Even Rep. Scott seems to recognize this, admitting, “We have not been fiscally responsible.” But his definition of “responsible” is not balancing spending with income; instead, a “responsible” government, according to Scott, would have raised the tax rates. “The only rational thing to do is to let the [Bush] tax cuts expire.” That is to say, when a corporation has a surmounting deficit, it would be irresponsible and irrational simply to cut salaries and overhead costs; its singular option must also include raising prices on its services. (This corporation may also incarcerate its customers for refusing to pay the required price increase.)
But would not a wiser and more rational question in response be, “How may we wean ourselves from federal dependence?” Do we really wish to continue the path that places our economic subsistence in the hands of a bureaucratized corporation? Would it not be better to have more choice over your own income—whether that be in entrepreneurship or private employment—so that these political corporate executives may not arbitrarily reduce your salary, while at the same time demand you purchase more of their increasingly expensive services?
“But,” the argument will be, “how many jobs will be lost in Virginia if the federal work force is cut?” This is mercantilist and socialist thinking, both of which assume there is a finite amount of wealth to be earned and exploited in the world. If we consider instead that the money not granted to the federal government, and thence not redistributed to its employees and subsidiarities, may be used to create more private wealth and opportunity, then overall these jobs are only reduced from the federal debit side of the books, and increased to the private credit side.
Surely, a decrease in government spending will have a direct negative impact on individual salaries and stability. But just as surely, an increase in government spending will also have a direct negative impact on individual salaries and stability—only these impacts have farther reaching consequences that threaten the very capabilities of our government’s primary responsibility to protect the individual’s right to work as he wishes, and to keep the fruits of that labor.
If we insist on allowing the government to extract income in proportion to its expenses–rather than insist its expenses be reduced in proportion to its income–simply because we are dependant upon their federal benevolence and wish to vote ourselves into prosperity, then Polybius was right: the politicians will have “created among the masses an appetite for gifts and a habit of receiving them; and democracy in its turn will be abolished and will change into a rule of force and violence.”
“For the people,” he warns,
having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the houses of office by his [social stature], institute the rule of violence; and then uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and seek once more an absolute master and a monarch.
This will be a perfect manifestation of class warfare.
