Should Government Be Made Smaller--or Just Made Better?

Everybody appears to be against big government and government spending. Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) has said of the government: “It’s got to be downsized. It’s gotten too big. We spend too much money.”

But then Dole said: “I . . . look at the audience and say, ‘Everybody in this room has been affected, directly or indirectly, by some government program.’ I see veterans out there. I see senior citizens. I see somebody who may have gone to vocational school. The government has done many good things.”

Is government too big? Does it spend too much? What are the good things it does? What should it be doing?

When I have asked my students whether they want to see the government cut spending, a majority of hands goes up. But when I ask about cutting specific major items in the federal budget--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education--there are very few hands. Among the young, even before the end of the Cold War, there was generally a majority for cutting defense spending. And among students generally of non-farm backgrounds, there have also been majorities for cutting agricultural subsidies. And, of course, everybody was against waste. But the Republican majority is trying to increase military spending and shows no inclination to threaten its supporters in the farm states. So aside from that waste, where are we? And where should we be?

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Where we seem to be, if moderates or President Clinton cannot stop us, is heading helter-skelter on a path of:

* Slashing outlays for the poorest among us, who have been broadly stigmatized as selfishly and irresponsibly producing babies on welfare rather than working--and who don’t vote much.

* Slashing outlays for Medicare, our support for health care for the elderly--which is more tricky because they do vote.

* Slashing and eliminating programs in support of college education--students and would-be students don’t vote much, but perhaps their parents do.

* Starving or eliminating programs in support of basic research and new technology.

* Thwarting efforts to expand investment in our future by improving the education and training of our young, protecting our environment and providing for the continuing maintenance and modernization of the infrastructure on which major economic powers must depend.

* Turning the welfare program over to states and localities with block grants with lesser funding, to set up a deadly competition to slash these programs to the bone--to human bones, instead of investing in child care, training and subsidization of employers and employees to move people from welfare to work.

Where we should be is quite another matter. The fact is, of course, that there are government programs that should be cut or eliminated--and there are others that should be expanded, and new ones instituted. What that means for the grand total should depend on the balance of programs where we would gain more from preserving them or increasing them and of programs where resources could better be devoted elsewhere.

And we should also consider the macroeconomic consequences. Aside from whether particular programs are useful, we cannot forget that every dollar spent is somebody’s income. If we take much of that away and substitutes do not come along, the economy will go into a tailspin.

Virtually all economists recognize the supreme value of a free market economy; it is part of our professional heritage, reinforced by the manifest failures of controlled, monopolized, collectivist regimes and the successes of economics that have moved to market competition. But virtually all economists recognize things that the free, competitive market, by its very nature cannot do--where government is essential.

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First, of course, we must have a set of laws and the police power to enforce them, without which neither an advanced economy nor civilized society itself can function. Given the widespread crime and fear of it among our citizens, we should be spending much more, not less, on the police to prevent crime--not merely punish it. And we cannot rely on business watchmen or private police or guns to stop crime--although too many of us act as if we can.

Second, we must have an educational system that prepares all of our young for productive employment with the exploding new technologies of the 21st Century. And, whether we have public or private schools, we cannot leave education to parents to finance by themselves. None but the wealthy could do so. There must be government financing for the bulk of the cost.

Third, we must use government to provide for all the “public goods” of our roads and bridges, harbors, airports, waterworks, waste disposal and protection of the land, water and air, without which we cannot survive.

And fourth, we must, like every advanced, modern society, have a social insurance system that provides adequately--indeed as generously as our means permit--for the elderly, the involuntarily unemployed, the disabled and the sick.

If are guided by these principles, we may still want to make government smaller. Then again, we might just find that not big government, but better government, is the issue.