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95 Chapter 6 between the night watchman and the leviathan: The Centrist’s Conception of government JUsT As we CenTrIsTs avoid the gravitational pull of the purely religious and the rigorously secular in matters of morals and metaphysics, we avoid another set of dichotomous extremes in the sphere of politics. If our accumulated political experience gained over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has taught us anything, it has taught us two basic truths. On one hand, the era of the laissez-faire state is over—and rightly so. Government inevitably has a role in leveling the disparities created by capitalism, and in redistributing to the least well off a measure of the vast amount of wealth we have generated as a society. On the other hand, in the course of pursuing the first goal, modern government has grown too large, with no indication that this trend will abate anytime soon. More to the point, big government is frequently grossly wasteful and inefficient. The centrist state treads a middle course between the profligacy of collectivism and the parsimonious austerity of the classical liberal’s limited state. Our guiding insight is not that redistribution within reasonable bounds is wrong, but that waste, inefficiency, and a variety of other evils that frequently accompany redistribution are wrong.1 The Runaway State “The state,” declared the nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat, “is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”2 If this view might once have been dismissed as the exaggerated bluster of a classical liberal, today it appears to be an uncontroversial truism. In 1900, just over 5 percent of the average American’s income went to federal, state, and local taxes combined . In 2007, thirty-three cents of every dollar earned went to the government.3 In fact, the figure is higher for those in the upper middle class, who shoulder the greatest proportionate tax burden relative to their income.4 The average American works until April 30 every year to earn that share of his or her income that will go toward taxes, and in some states “tax freedom day” is well into May.5 Paralleling this rise in taxation, federal, state, and local governments spend onethird of everything that we produce as a nation. The federal government alone consumes slightly over 20 percent of our gross domestic product. Taxation has also become more concentrated at the federal level. In 1900, about 60 percent of government spending took place at the state and local levels; today, the federal 96 The Political Centrist government spends more than twice as much (about 69 percent) as all the states and localities combined.6 Among other things, more localized spending ensured that state and local representatives would not saddle their constituents with the kind of silly and wasteful spending that was approved in the 2004 budget.7 All the while, the rate of spending continues to increase at both the state and federal levels. State spending rose by 89 percent in the 1990s, and federal spending increased by 38 percent between 2000 and 2005. Federal spending alone now tops more than $22,000 per household on average, up from $19,000 in 2000.8 Nor can the explosion in taxing and spending be laid at the door of liberal Democrats alone. Total government spending increased by more than a third during George W. Bush’s first term in office, while discretionary spending was up by more than 50 percent. Nor was most of this related to the post-9/11 effect. Under Bush’s watch, Medicaid spending increased by 49 percent, federal spending for housing and commerce by 58 percent, and federal spending for regional and community development by a staggering 324 percent. Bush’s total budget was 8 percent higher in 2005 than in 2004, and 9 percent higher still the next year, 2006. Notwithstanding his promise to roll back government, Bush did not veto a single spending measure during his time in office until October 2007. In 2000, the Government Accounting Office estimated that the U.S. government was committed to spending over $20 trillion more that it had any hope of collecting in taxes. By 2005, after President Bush’s first term, this figure had more than doubled, to $43 trillion.9 Over the past half century, the only president to successfully cut government spending was Bill Clinton, a Democrat. George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, both Republicans, each oversaw the...

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