"Discretionary" Federal Spending

The rest of the federal budget – roughly $800 billion [in 2005] – consists of annually approved spending that does not rise to the dubious distinction of “entitlements.” A slim majority of this “discretionary spending” goes to national defense, which to its credit is authorized by the Constitution. What remains, however, is a train of budgetary abuses aimed at micromanaging and subsidizing such things as speed limits, minimum drinking ages, medical care, medical research, the arts, farming, housing, retirement pensions, child-rearing, the content and manner of political campaigning, educational standards, gender quotas in college athletics, unemployment-insurance criteria, state and local policing, union rules, stem-cell research, breast cancer, AIDS, school lunches, abstinence instruction, and even mental health screenings.* Any States that entertain setting their own standards in these fields run the risk of losing funding, so the States toe the federal line like the docile vassals they have been reduced to. Embarrassing enough, those States (mostly Southern) that are likeliest to raise philosophical objections to such profligate federal spending are the largest recipients thereof, as this buys their silence.**

Discretionary spending has also corrupted America’s intellectual life. Universities receive incredible sums of money from the federal government in the form of research grants, scholarships, and similar redistributions of wealth. As a result, the academic class has become thoroughly statist and has lost any vestige of intellectual integrity it may have once possessed. Year after year the universities churn out bland publications and even blander graduates operating under the same unspoken assumption – that it is fitting and proper for government to reshape the world. Anyone entertaining an opposite viewpoint would be hard-pressed to find a more hostile environment than the modern American university, the supposed bastion of “diversity” that, in truth, prizes conformity above all else. A perfect example of the morass that the universities have fallen into is the recent debate concerning military recruiters, whom some of our “elite” institutions wish to keep away from their students. This refusal to cooperate with the federal government appears rather principled at first, until one learns that the universities simultaneously insist that the federal government may not retaliate by curtailing funding. As with Social Security, we see again the base notion of a “right” to receive other people’s money, when in fact it was wrong and illegal to transfer that money in the first place. Even worse, the universities have stooped so low as to cloak their funding addiction with the First Amendment, arguing that in today’s America it is impossible to separate individual freedom from governmental action. This is the quintessence of statism – that only the state can set us free.

Beyond the moribund realm of modern academia, discretionary spending has infiltrated so many aspects of everyday life that Americans now adhere to the syllogism that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished unless the federal government participates. And again, anyone who suggests otherwise provokes vituperation: if you oppose federal funding for stem-cell research, you are thought to oppose stem-cell research; if you oppose federal funding for breast-cancer research, you are thought to oppose breast-cancer research; and if you oppose federal funding for AIDS research, you are thought to be the devil incarnate. Politicians who shower the Treasury’s money on the most recent or faddish undertakings are labeled as “compassionate” or “caring,” while politicians who voice doubts are treated as cruelly opposing the endeavor itself. A prime example of this corrupted thinking manifested itself in the context of the 2004 earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean, a literally Earth-shaking event that spawned tsunamis that wiped out thousands of human lives plus vast infrastructure. Americans showed that they are quite capable of acting virtuously on their own, for within two weeks of the disaster they had voluntarily and heroically contributed over $200 million, and the relief agencies soon declared that no more private donations were needed. Yet when the federal government directed taxpayer dollars towards the relief effort, almost no one stood up to criticize such an illegal misuse of funds. The government has no place using confiscated wealth for such purposes, and by doing so the government again acted as a thief rather than as an agent of lawful authority. Virtue cannot be compelled, and monies obtained by compulsion likewise cannot be spent “virtuously.”

Most of what goes on in our daily lives – the triumphs as well as the tragedies – are none of the federal government’s business. Where does Washington, D.C. get off deciding whether to teach birth-control or abstinence to schoolchildren? Whether breast cancer deserves more attention than prostate cancer? Whether the local police department needs more officers? Or whether colleges must have a proportionate number of male and female athletes? By purchasing its way into Americans’ hearts, the federal government has once again steamrolled decentralized, local rule in favor of centralized and monopolistic control, thereby prolonging inept national policies while strangling more community-convenient initiatives in the cradle. Imagine how much more prosperity we would enjoy if the incredible sums of wealth illegally re-distributed were left in our own hands. What unknown technologies, medicines, and labor-saving devices have been postponed or lost forever because of the federal government’s insatiable appetite for control? What misery awaits the coming generations because the government has buried them under a crushing debt even before their birth? Each individual occupies the best position to determine what makes him happy, so happiness prospers when individuals control their own wealth in the pursuit of their own happiness. When government arrogantly asserts that it knows best how to make you happy, and government takes your wealth in order to implement its vision, then the inevitable result is less happiness and less prosperity.

In an ironic twist to this unconstitutional spending saga, former Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia once proposed that federal funds go towards teaching schoolchildren about the Constitution, a gesture resembling beating schoolchildren with crowbars in order to teach them the virtues of pacifism. A far better way of reviving the Constitution’s principles is to eliminate federal spending on public schools and on all other projects beyond the federal government’s purview, to return those billions of dollars to the States and their citizens so that local needs are truly met, and to demand that the federal government focus on those narrow objectives that the Constitution dedicates to it – such as the security of our borders and the protection of our lives (two missions that the federal government has spectacularly failed at in recent years). 

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* Recent federal appropriations bills have sought to direct funds to the identification and treatment of schoolchildren’s “mental illnesses” such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), presumably to make the children more susceptible to government-approved lesson plans.

** Poetic justice emerged from George W. Bush’s 2004 electoral victory when certain “liberal” commentators bitterly recommended that the North secede from the South, since the South was receiving the lion’s share of the patronage that Northerners have for so long insisted that the federal government may distribute. Apparently the Northerners believed that upon releasing the genie from the bottle, the genie would do the bidding of only they who opened it.