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December 22, 2004

Other People's Money

It was too much to hope for: Washington D.C. caved in to Major League Baseball extortion this week, agreeing to pay $584 million (or however much more it actually will end up costing) in order to lure the Montreal Expos to the district. (Imagine what they might have had to pay for a major league team.) The city council made the decision despite evidence that public support was against spending public money for a baseball team. That's no surprise; the city of Milwaukee pulled a similar trick several years ago when the Brewers threatened to move. After a referendum to raise taxes to pay for a new stadium was voted down by the people, the local government passed a tax increase to override the amendment. That D.C. would follow in Milwaukee's footsteps is hardly surprising. We'll see if the district at least ends up with a decent product on the field.

Personally, I'm a little more interested in what drives city government to make this kind of deal. Washington D.C. is not a town noted for fiscal stability in the first place. The city is fraught with problems that really are government's business, particularly the district's appalling crime rates. Yet the city government is going to burn half-a-billion dollars (or more) to build a stadium for millionaire owners so that millionaire players can play a game there. And I say that as someone who believes that baseball is one of America's greatest inventions and that the presence of a baseball team can be a great thing for a community. But all the great things that baseball brings don't cover the fact it's an improper use of public funds to subsidize a sports team.

It seems that a lot of people believe that all money belongs to the government, and that the rest of us should just be thankful for what we get to keep. That's certainly the attitude of the people who argue that tax cuts take money from government or subsidize the wealthy. But that attitude completely inverts the relationship between the American people and their government. Here government is supposed to exist to serve the people, not the reverse. Many people will argue that government does try to do just that, by giving money to those who need it most. Except that this once again elides the question of where that money comes from. The money Democrats use to help the poor and the money President Bush is spending on AIDS programs share one important trait: it's not their money to give.

Democrats frequently argue that compassion demands that the government help people. A common frame for this argument is how can a country this rich allow people to be homeless, or be poor, etc. This is a powerful argument that speaks to most of us regardless of our political affiliation. It is hard to look at the poor and argue that things shouldn't be done to help them. So, very often, we end up standing by while the government steps in and spends money it has no right to give.

I've talked about our being a nation of laws and not of men many times. I suspect some have not understood precisely what that means, however. Being a nation of laws does not simply mean that we have a judicial and criminal system in place to deal with those who break the laws. Every dictatorship is full of laws, but few would argue that a dictatorship is a nation of laws and not of men. A nation of laws is a nation that sets out certain codes in advance and that holds everyone to those standards. Think of a board game: when you sit down with your friends to play Monopoly, the rules are laid out in advance for you. You probably wouldn't play the game if people could change the rules after the game had started, because other players could agree to change the rules to favor themselves and disadvantage you (or vice versa). Only by setting down the rules in advance and requiring everyone to play by them can you keep the game fair. A nation is no different. In a nation of laws, everyone knows the rules (or at least can easily discover them) in advance, and they choose how to live in accordance with those laws. Contrast that to what we have in America today, where laws are continually changed to benefit certain groups at the expense of others. As just one example, Archer Daniels Midland lobbies for ethanol subsidies and farm subsidies, guaranteeing them big profits regardless of the market value of their work. This makes a mockery of the free market, which is supposed to give people the opportunity to test their products against the desires of the people, not get a government law passed that ensures profitability. By choosing winners and losers, our government long ago gave up any claim to being a nation of laws.

Note that this does not mean we cannot ever pass new laws. In the 200-plus years since the adoption of our Constitution, the world has changed dramatically, and we'd be foolish to try and prevent our government from addressing those changes. But government is supposed to address those changes within the framework that was intended to limit it: the Constitution. As this anecdote relates, however, we stepped outside those bounds long ago, and show little inclination to look back.

Government is unquestionably a necessarily evil. There are certain functions that the private sector cannot address adequately, so we grant our government the powers necessary to resolve them. But the intent of the Constitution was to restrict those powers very carefully in order to prevent abuse. Power may or may not corrupt, but it certainly draws a certain type of person to it just as a moth is drawn to a flame. Except when these people take power, instead of them going up in smoke, the limits on their power char like tissue paper.

Which brings us back to today's story, where the so-called representative government of Washington D.C. is patting each other on the back for bringing baseball back to the Capitol without giving a second thought to who will actually pay for it. It isn't their money, after all.