By Justin Williams
The contract theory of how government forms is one of a community banding together to prevent violence. They all want rules and regulations to keep one another from preying upon each of their property. We understand that this is how the United States came together. It was a social contract that was semi not imposed on. As the country has grown so has the size of government. Politicians went from being part-time to full-time. They became professionals. They mastered spreading out the costs and concentrating the benefits. This is in completely disregard for the generality principle, as this contract theory means equal protection for equal pay.
The generality principle is one in which everyone who pays for a public good is not excluded from that good. This is called in more common terms discrimination. This means that if the government protected my house from a fire then it would also have to protect my neighbors house, assuming he pays the same taxes I do. We have long abandon this ideal and both F.A. Hayek and James Buchanan have advocated and studied this in detail. It is the simple idea that if “We the people” pay the costs then “We the people” should receive all its benefits.
Only then will the costs get smaller. As long as the politicians can get you to fill their pockets so that they can spread it out among its special interests then the government will only get bigger. It is a minority exploiting a majority.This is exactly what earmarks are. They are spreading the costs among the whole of the United States, while concentrating the benefits in their area.
The bigger problem is that this government waste does not account for all of the social cost. When the government offers discriminatory funds, special interests will line up for it around the blocks. The extra costs we do not see are the funds used to lobby the government. These will sometimes be more than one company, thus causing competitive bidding for the contract. Meaning that some companies spend funds on something they did not get, funds that could have been used for something better. Imagine if you went to Wal-Mart to buy a new DVD player and there was a politician who was given the DVD player free and you and the rest of the consumers had to find a way to get it from him. You would wine and dine him, while offering him outright payments (or bribes).
So what is the solution? The solution is to call on politicians to not allow discriminatory politics to persist. That means that if we are going to give government handouts to people, we must give it to all. Hopefully then government will begin to restrain itself. Of course, this will never happen because you are asking for much of the power the politicians wield back.
Buchanan, James and Roger Congleton, “Politics by Principle, Not Interest” (1998) The Collected Works of James Buchanan Volume 11. Liberty Fund. 2003.
