The issue of deficit financing is another, where libertarians and pacifists agree.
The biggest deficits, by far, are piled up during war-time. The "nanny-state" stuff you're complaining about, is small potatoes, compared to what happens when a government kites a check, puts it on the VISA card, to finance a war. Most governments consider the power to tax, to be a blank check. They get their war now, and let the next Administration (or the next generation) worry about paying for it. It's a classic example of externalizing costs, and thereby creating a false cost/benefit equation.
Imagine if Bush couldn't run deficits. He'd have had to come to the American people, and say, "I'm going to raise your taxes by $500,000,000,000 in 2004, so we can bring democracy to Iraq and have a balanced budget." What would Rove say about that, as a campaign slogan?
Jefferson was quite clear on this issue. He wanted a Constitutional amendment, to ban government borrowing (to finance wars or anything else), and ban all debts that couldn't be paid off during the working lifetime (which he defined as 18 years) of the people who incurred the debt (and presumably got the benefits). He said any other policy was immoral:
"We believe--or we act as if we believed--that although an individual father cannot alienate the labor of his son, the aggregate body of fathers may alienate the labor of all their sons, of their posterity, in the aggregate, and oblige them to pay for all the enterprises, just or unjust, profitable or ruinous, into which our vices, our passions or our personal interests may lead us. But I trust that this proposition needs only to be looked at by an American to be seen in its true point of view, and that we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves." --Thomas Jefferson, 1813
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing… I know that to pay all proper expenses within the year would, in case of war, be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars could be reduced in that proportion… --Thomas Jefferson, 1798 |
