Good Government: The World’s Only Free Lunch

John Krull, writing in the State House File, has a great column entitled “To coin a phrase” that you should go read. The passage that prompted me to write this post:

Because conservatives have spent the better part of the past century equating taxation with theft—and arguing, along the way, that good government is the world’s only free lunch—they always find themselves in a quandary when they have to pay for something.

The free lunch line is a good way of capturing the dynamic you frequently see out of libertarians and “small government” champions. Typically they’ll rail against government in the abstract. When pushed on examples of the many necessary and useful things that government does, they’ll often retreat to some variant “oh, I’m not advocating for anarchy, obviously *some* government is necessary.” The massive amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse that they are sure exists usually lies elusively just over the horizon. Or maybe they’ll extrapolate anecdata into something systemic.

And, as Krull points out, “the entire civilian federal government payroll in 2022 came to $271 billion. Even if Musk and Trump fired everyone and allowed meat to go uninspected, Social Security checks to go unprocessed and planes to fall from the sky every day, they still would be $130 billion short of paying for that tax cut that will help them line their own pockets.”

Whatever sound and fury gets kicked up, I think we’ll find that the point of the exercise is for Musk, Trump, and their cronies to rob us blind so that they can stuff a few more billion dollars into their pockets. (I always like the counterargument that “they are so rich that they’ll be incorruptible, they couldn’t possibly want more money.” As if the guy with 57 guitars couldn’t possibly want a 58th guitar.)