One summer, way back when I was in my mid teens, my family went on vacation to Greece, where both my parents were born. One night, on my father’s home island, we went to visit one of my father’s childhood friends, who now owned and operated one of the island’s biggest hotels.
My father’s friend had a daughter, about my age, and the adults sent us off to have dinner at one of the hotel’s restaurants to get us out of their hair. Given that this was Greece sometime around 1980, my dinner companion (whose name escapes me) was typical of Greek youth in that she was a Communist (of the flavor of the moment, that is). Given that I was an American, and America was the Bad Guy in the eyes of young Greeks, I became a sounding board against which she could voice complaints about America’s policies. And, given that she was in her mid-teens, those complaints had been prepackaged for her by whomever she was listening to.
That this was a bit rude is beyond doubt. That she was a raging hypocrite in voicing communist and socialist gobbledygook while eating Chateaubriand (yes, that’s literally what she ordered) in Daddy’s hotel restaurant is also beyond doubt. One of the things she spouted does, however, was valid then, and remains valid today, across many levels of politics and with regard to human nature itself.
She started by complaining that European nations were being forced to adhere to American foreign policy, and asserted that America was able to apply this “force” because America gave lots of money to the nations who were doing America’s bidding against their will (and best interests, apparently). I was reminded of that conversation when I came across an article on federal spending’s influence on states. The piece goes into detail about how strings-attached (as they always are) federal funding affects state-level governance. This is hardly revelatory, and far more likely to elicit “well, no shit Sherlock” than “wow, that never occurred to me,” but sometimes we forget its ubiquity in the functioning of our governments.
People decry the corrosive effects of big money in politics, but they too often limit their denunciations for the cases where private sector money is used to try and influence electoral outcomes. However, limiting the general principle to such a narrow segment of the realm misses the forest for the trees. Total political spending for the 2012 election was about $7B. By contrast, last year, Americans spent $70B on lottery tickets, $6B on potato chips, $6B at Taco Bell, and $5B on college sports swag. Meanwhile, the federal government’s transfers to lower levels of government have grown to 1/7th of total government spending i.e. in excess of half a trillion dollars a year.
So, while our system is federal in nature, and there are elements of governance that are supposed to happen at the state level, the federal government can and has worked around the federalism established by the Constitution. The feds aren’t allowed to use the hard coercion of direct legislative mandates, so they use the soft coercion of fiscal dependence.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis described states as laboratories of democracy, wherein competing ideas and policies are compared and contrasted. Our federal system, by introducing some degree of market competition into political governance, has served as a bulwark against the relentless creep of statism. The substantial migration of people between states (and the reapportionment of representation at the federal level that happens every decade) is demonstrative proof that people vote with their feet, and that those votes matter. If a high-tax, high-service, big-government model is attractive, it will draw residents. If a low-tax, low-service, low-intrusiveness model is attractive, it, too, will draw residents. We can glean many lessons by looking at migratory trends, but those lessons are increasingly dampened and diluted by the coercive and corrosive effects of federal transfers. Federal “guidelines” increasingly restrict states’ abilities to differentiate themselves from each other, and the “laboratories of democracy” that test different ideas will produce fewer good results.
America has not yet become a Europe-style welfare state in part because of our federal system. Those who want America to move in that direction are thwarted by that system. Submission through dependence is, however, a powerful weapon in their arsenal, and it will be one of the means they use to break down the impediments they face as they seek to impose their will on the rest of us.
Obviously, this lesson extends beyond the sapping of states’ rights and autonomy. The submission through dependence phenomenon occurs at lower levels of government, and all the way down to individuals’ dependence on government largesse. The latter is called welfare trap theory, and it is one of the big pitfalls created by social safety nets.
There is a moral maxim, found in many cultures, called the Golden Rule. It says do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Comic artist Johnny Hart, who wrote a strip called The Wizard of Id for many years, offered up a different Golden Rule. When queried “What the heck is the Golden Rule by one of his subjects, the King replied “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
The latter version of the Golden Rule seems to be a more appropriate maxim for understanding modern life. That’s a shame.
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