I’ve been seeing this meme a lot now. Most recently from the first response to ITR champion’s government spending thread. Lately Americans on the left have been making the point that those on the right act as if increasing government spending is a goal in and of itself rather than a means to an end. That is, conservatives want less spending and to mirror that they believe liberals want more just because. Have conservative Americans been making this assumption (perhaps even unconsciously) or not?
For myself I can see how it would be easy to slip into such a mindset but I have no idea what conservatives themselves (who are doing the thinking after all) think about it. Whether accurate or not it doesn’t seem like a particularly useful meme for lefties. It doesn’t point to a deeper narrative other than the basic: righties are “wrong”. As Monty Python would say, it’s not argument it’s merely contradiction. It doesn’t seem difficult to craft a much more favorable meme from the situation
For one influential constituency, government employees, spending is a goal in itself. Other than that we conservatives know that for most liberals government spending is a means to some other end. The problem is that government is like a salesman with one tonic to sell. If you feel tired the tonic will pep you up and if you feel frazzled the tonic will relax you. If you drink the tonic and the problem has not gone away you just did not drink enough.
A liberal sees a problem and the answer is always more government. Health insurance is too expensive?, the government can fix that. Health insurance does not cover birth control? the government can fix that. Too many doctors? Government can fix that. Doctors make too much money?, government can fix that. So on ad infinitum.
Conservatives know that pills and elixirs that claim to do everything, generally do nothing. Government is not omnicompetent. It has a vital part to play, it should do that the best it can, and leave the people to do the rest.
I believe it is true in many cases. Lefties/progressives can dress the idea up with some other vague justifications but spending money sometimes is the goal and it is even admitted as such. For example, many different groups have been complaining for a couple of decades at least that our national infrastructure is crumbling and the government needs to spend an exorbitant amount of money to fix it. I find the widespread and dire nature of the claim dubious at best but let’s assume it is true. Other progressive types have expressed a vague plan to create millions of new jobs through government infrastructure initiatives and that will cost many hundreds of billions of dollars at least.
You can argue that the object here isn’t to spend money, it is to invest in infrastructure and create jobs. All government programs have some vague goals attached to them but that doesn’t mean the reasoning is sound. In this case, one goal should be to fix infrastructure in the most cost effective way possible but that goal is jeopardized when a side goal is to also create as many new jobs as possible under the same pretenses. That is how you end up with huge and inefficient government bureaucracies that achieve relatively little for the money spent and never seem to go away.
It is the recent history of large government programs and costs that spiral out of control that lead many of us to believe that the people that design such things are either inept, incompetent, corrupt, or deceitful. It may be a combination of those but it is rarely efficient.
I don’t think that’s true. A good friend of mine from college went to work for the FDA. She was an inspector who went to fish processing plants to check their compliance with food safety regulations; cook times, temperatures, sterilization procedures, that sort of thing. I doubt she would have done the job for free, but she did not see spending as a goal in itself. Those rules aren’t just something that somebody made up; they are in place to ensure that food is safe to eat. My friend thought that her job was worthwhile, and she tried to do it well.
I’d be more likely to believe that the groups known as liberals, on the whole, views government spending as a means to an end if I could get a clear explanation of what the end actually. I am aware that there are a large number of government programs for which liberals, generally speaking, demand more money, and they may not all have the same end. Hence a list of ends, and a statement of which government programs are means to which end, would suffice.
I’ve seen in my lifetime little evidence that liberals view spending as a means to an end and more evidence that they view spending as desirable in itself. I’ll explain using the example of one area where the chorus of demands for more money is neverending: public schools. I see two possible hypotheses for why liberals might want more money pouring into public schools:
[ul]
[li]They desire a better education for the students in those schools and think more money will lead to that.[/li][li]It’s primarily driven by certain constituencies, particularly the teachers unions, who like receiving as much money as possible.[/li][/ul]
Then I can ask what would be the visible consequences of each hypothesis. If the first were correct, liberals would surely demand both higher school budgets and accountability from the school system at every level. If the second were correct, they’d probably demand higher budgets and fight tooth and nail against accountability. The facts speak plainly enough in favor of the second hypothesis.
Whenever a conservative position is criticized from the left, they like to strawman liberals by associating them with some polar opposite position. This is because the mouthpieces for the modern conservative movement in America are, by and large, petulant idiots.
Just to mention the flip side; many liberals stereotype conservatives as people who believe that nearly all government spending is inefficient, wasteful, and incompetent.
Some of the conservative posters in this thread do not help to dispel that image.
You are confusing the goal with the justification for that goal. In an ideal world, keeping bridges from falling down should be justification enough. But it is easier to get votes if you can tell your constituents that you brought jobs. It is hardly only a liberal position - defense spending spread all over the country is justified by job creation also.
Infrastructure improvement of course creates jobs in the private sector, since relatively few people in government supervise lots of construction workers. Which is as it should be.
ACA is an excellent example of a program where the end - better health outcomes and insurance coverage - is very clear. Yet conservatives were against it.
How testing helps accountability is another debate entirely. Of course a bloc likes to help the segment of voters who vote for and support it. So liberals are not that worried about accountability of teachers. Conservatives are not that worried about the accountability of Wall Street, and fight tooth and nail against consumer protection and regulations that would keep them from blowing up the economy again. I think the crash was a bigger problem than some small set of teachers being ineffective.
Speaking as a government employee my goal is to understand the biology behind Cancer in the most efficient way possible, and to nix studies that are unlikely to advance that goal. Not just to spend money for the sake of doing so.
The OP has set up a false dichotomy. I believe the vast majority of liberals love to spend other people’s money but I also believe that most other political persuasions do too. Progressives like social programs just like conservative foreign policy hawks love to spend an unfathomable of money on the military. The list goes on and the only difference is how they justify to themselves and the general public but the core problem is the same.
It is only true fiscal conservatives (there are some real ones and lots of fakers) and libertarians that see all government spending as a necessary evil that has to kept to the lowest level possible as a matter of philosophy. Even those groups aren’t opposed to essential spending. It just has to be kept in check rather than set on an expansionary track and long-term deficit spending is a huge no-no under those philosophies.
In summary, I would say that most liberals of all stripes do like to spend money no matter how they justify it. Many of them are economic liberals and ‘tax and spend’ is a key part of the definition of that term. However, they aren’t the only ones. Other groups have their own priorities and yet still manage to spend or waste just as much while being in the same type of denial.
Studies show that conservatives and liberals have very different modes of cognition. Neither is necessarily better or worse than the other. Indeed, if a group encountered a sudden danger on a jungle trek it might be better to listen to the conservative – who will quickly choose between Fight and Flee – rather than the liberal – who might check for Internet signal and then try to find what worked best in controlled studies.
But conservatives tend to see only in black and white, and do not understand quantitative nuance. A liberal wants to increase the tax on the rich from 35% to 38% ? He hates the rich and intends to push the tax to 99%. A liberal wants to increase minimum wage from $7 to $8? He really wants $99 but is afraid of being laughed at. A liberal wants to regulate pharmaceuticals? He also wants to regulate electronic toys, and what you do with your wife at night.
It does make it hard to discuss public policy with them, but let’s do invite some right-wingers along when we go trekking in the jungle.
That seems to be a fairly useless statement, though, as I can turn it right back around. What, exactly, is the “end” of conservative attempts to cut government spending?
You might say liberal special interest groups (namely government workers) may say that they’re trying to improve things with better spending, but are really trying to line their own pockets, liberals can just as easily say that conservative special interest groups pushing for less money are just trying to move the money into their own pockets, no matter what they say about it improving things.
To work off your school example, a common conservative proposal is some sort of voucher to allow parents to choose to send their kids to private schools. Is that really an honest belief that it will make things better, or is it just that private schools want more money?
So you say, right before you brag about how deep and well-considered your judgement is. I’d like tosay it displayed chutzpah, but it didn’t. Just loads of self-congratulation.
Another delusion of the Left is that they are born to rule, while conservatives can become the new slaves and servants in their preferred order. And of course, soldiers, sent out to die for the higher causes of their educated, self-congratulatory master race.
