A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom: Prospects for Reducing the Size of the State
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A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom: Prospects for Reducing the Size of the State
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780255366694 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | London Publishing Partnership |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2014 |
| Series: | Occasional Papers |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 136 |
| File size: | 978 KB |
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A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom
By Grover Norquist, Nima Sanandaji, Matthew Sinclair, David B. Smith
IEA
Copyright © 2014 The Institute of Economic AffairsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-255-36669-4
CHAPTER 1
A U-TURN ON THE ROAD TO SERFDOM: PROSPECTS FOR REDUCING THE SIZE OF THE STATE
Grover Norquist
I am delighted to deliver this year's Hayek lecture. I ran the campaign in the United States to get President George Herbert Walker Bush to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award to Friedrich Hayek, and was delighted when that happened in 1992. Friedrich Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom describing both the forces that drove the growth of government and the dangers of socialism by any name. Hayek argued in 1944 that it was not just a German problem, it was our problem as well. He predicted the future too well – the recent past we have lived.
Margaret Thatcher promised 'no U-turn' in her drive to limit government. What I want to talk about today is this: how do we execute a U-turn and reverse direction on our present road to serfdom here in Britain, in the United States and throughout the world? In the United States, in 1774, when we were still a colony, the government spent 2 per cent of the American colonists' income. At the same time, the nice people of London had 20 per cent of their income taken in taxes. Over the last several centuries, things have become rougher on both sides of the Atlantic as far as liberty is concerned. The state has grown. In the United States a third of people's income, on average, goes to the government, and here it has grown as well. How do we turn this around? How do we get from heading in the wrong direction, decade after decade, in terms of the size and scope of government, and begin to move towards more limited government?
In the United States, one of the first things that was important was to get the political parties aligned in a way that made sense. We have two parties in the United States. In Europe, a party can get 2 per cent of the vote in some countries and it can then decide who the prime minister is and be very important. In the United States, if you get 2 per cent of the vote in an election, you're officially a 'nut'. You may get to be a radio talk show host after the election, but you don't fly in the big aeroplane, and you don't get to serve in Congress. So we divide up into two teams. For many decades, the two teams, the Republicans and Democrats, were largely regional parties.
If somebody told you they were Republican, the only thing you knew about them was that they were born north of the Mason–Dixon Line. You didn't know if they wanted a bigger government or a smaller government – or anything else. There were conservatives who were Democrats, and liberals who were Republicans. There were quite a number of little old ladies in Mississippi who agreed with Ronald Reagan on absolutely everything and voted for George McGovern, because Sherman had recently been quite unpleasant to Atlanta.
The 'leave us alone' coalition
During Reagan's lifetime, we did sort out the two parties along lines of principle not geography. One party largely supports reducing the size and scope of the state and increasing individual liberty. The other party tends to see human progress requiring an increasingly powerful and large government. The central issue dividing the parties is the size of the state. The Republican Party today, the Reagan Republican Party, is a collection of individuals with one thing in common: on the issue that moves their vote – not every issue, but on the issue that moves their vote – what they want from the government is simply to be left alone.
Who sits at the Republican table? Taxpayers, people who vote on the tax issue. They want the tax burden reduced. People concerned about property rights want their property rights respected. The business community – big businesses and small businesses – are not asking for special favours: they are not asking for the government to go and kneecap competitors, they just wish to be left alone (there are businesses that want the government to go and kneecap their competitors, but they bat for the other team). Around this table are also two million Americans who home-school their children. This freedom was only legalised in the past 25 years. These are people making tremendous sacrifices to give their children an education. It is a major commitment and the dominant issue in their life. They do not knock on your door and tell you that you should be a home-schooler: they simply wish to be left alone. The millions of Americans who make the sacrifice to pay for private and parochial education for their children – in addition to their taxes – also hold parental rights in education as a vote-moving political principle.
Then there is the Second Amendment community – I fully realise that nobody in Europe understands this but, in the United States, the Second Amendment, or gun rights, is a big issue. More than nine million Americans have a concealed-carry permit allowing them to carry a gun on their person. Almost twenty million Americans have hunting licences. I serve on the board of directors for the National Rifle Association, which has four million members. We don't go around urging people to be hunters. We don't require that all fourth-grade children be taught books in state schools entitled 'Heather has Two Hunters'. We are simply asking to be left alone to protect ourselves and our families.
There are also members of the various communities of faith in the United States for whom the most important thing in their life is to practise their faith and to transmit it to their children. Evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Mormons hold very different views of religion, but are united in their preferred relationship with the state: they simply want to be left alone. For each group, first choice, when we were designing the Constitution, might have been: 'make everybody be my religion', but because we were already diverse at the beginning, the achievable second choice was 'everybody gets left alone'.
This is an extremely important thing to understand because, sometimes when you hear the discussion in the United States, you would think that the coalition I am describing will not hold together because some of the 'religious right' want to impose their religious values on others. That is why you have to look at political activity in terms of vote-moving issues. The 'religious right' came into being in the 1970s. Why? It was because the Carter administration was going after Christian radio stations, using the 'fairness doctrine', a regulation originally designed to require TV and radio news to present both sides of a political issue. Christian radio viewed this as an assault on religious liberty. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was threatening to revoke the nonprofit status of Christian schools, which were seen by the government-school teachers' unions as a competitive threat: so these groups organised in self-defence; they wanted to be left alone; they feared state power. Understand that and you will understand why they sit at the same table and work reasonably well with people who work all day, never go to church, and simply want to pay lower taxes.
What is important is that everyone around the table wishes to be left alone on their key issue, and they vote for the same candidate. The candidate says, 'I will leave your kids alone, your guns alone, your money alone, your property alone, your faith alone' and he wins the votes of all these people.
Then the candidate and the party that puts itself in that position can move forward. It doesn't mean everyone in the centre-right coalition agrees on everything: they certainly don't. They don't all have tea together; they don't socialise. The guy who wants to make money all day looks across the table at the guy who wants to go to church all day and says, 'That's not how I spend my time.' They both look over at the guy who wants to fondle his guns all day and say: 'That's not how we spend our time.' But, for the party of liberty to advance, it is not necessary that everyone is agreed on what they would do with their liberty. It is simply necessary that we each agree on moving towards liberty.
That's how the coalition became self-aware in time for the 1980 election. The establishment looked at it and said, 'This will fall apart any moment,' because they were looking at the secondary and tertiary issues on which the coalition did not agree. There you will find lots of disagreements, but on primary votemoving issues, they are not in conflict.
Conflict among the opponents of liberty: the 'takings coalition'
When Hillary Clinton was running for the Senate, back in 2000, she gave a speech saying, 'What we progressives need is a meeting like Grover runs in Washington, DC.' I was asked by the press what I thought of that, and I explained how our centre-right coalition meeting works. We put 160 people together every week in a room where there are wide disagreements on what is important, except that what is important to each person is that they be free in the zone that matters to them.
Progressives, the left, have tried to put together similar meetings from time to time. Who would sit at Hillary Clinton's table, recently stolen by Barack Obama? Around the table might be trial lawyers, labour union bosses and big city political machines. Also the two wings of the dependency movement: people who are locked into welfare dependency and people who make $90,000 a year managing the dependency of people and making sure none of them get jobs and become Republicans. Then we have all the coercive utopians: the people who get government grants to push the rest of us around. The people who mandate cars too small to put your entire family into; the people who designed and required that we must all have toilets too small to flush completely; the people who insist on those light bulbs that convince you that you have glaucoma; and the people who require that on the Sabbath you must separate the green glass from the white glass from the brown glass for the recycling priests.
They have a list of things that you have to do and a list of things you are not allowed to do that is slightly longer and more tedious than Leviticus. It just goes on, and on, and on. So around the left's table, the 'takings coalition' can get along with each other as long as there is enough money in the centre of the table. They can work together as long as taxes are raised and there is more money pouring into the centre of the table to share. They can then cheerfully sit together in the way that they do in the movies after the bank robbery passing out the loot: 'One for you, one for you, one for you,' and everybody is happy.
However, if we do our jobs correctly, and we say 'no new taxes' and we stop throwing cash into the centre of that table, then all our friends on the left begin to look at each other in a way that is more like the second-to-last scene in those lifeboat movies. Now they are trying to decide who they are going to eat or who they are going to throw overboard.
Our job, step one in the fight for liberty, is to ensure that we don't make things worse; don't throw money into the centre of the statist table; do not feed the beast. Don't raise taxes is rule number one. If you stop the flow of tax dollars, then the other team, as they see the money pile dwindling, begin gnawing on the guy sitting next to them. If they can't eat taxpayers they will fight each other for the limited amount of other people's money that is available.
The left is not made up of friends and allies; it is made up of competing parasites.
Pledging not to increase taxes
So, how do we strengthen our team? How do we identify more people whose votes and political activities lead towards liberty, and how do we reduce the number of people who view the state as that mechanism whereby they get their hands on other people's stuff, and other people's lives?
Step one, I always thought, was limiting taxation. That is why I run Americans for Tax Reform. We created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that many candidates sign. It is a written, witnessed pledge to their constituents that they will never vote to raise taxes. The goal of that pledge is to make it difficult for Congress to ever raise taxes because then, and only then, can you begin to have a conversation about reducing spending. Once you remove the tax hike option then you may have an opportunity to focus on reforming government to cost less.
We learned the importance of holding the line against taxes in two painful failures by Republican presidents Reagan and Bush 41. In 1982, the Democrat party said to Reagan: 'We promise to cut spending by three dollars if you agree to raise taxes by one dollar.' A three-to-one ratio was agreed. Reagan faced a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate that was pre-Reagan in its thinking. So Reagan was kind of alone. Just as Margaret Thatcher may have been the only Thatcherite in her own government at first, Reagan was the only Reaganite in Washington for quite some time. He took that bad deal. At the end of the day, taxes were raised and spending was not reduced.
This happened eight years later, to George Bush senior. They offered him two dollars of imaginary spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases. Spending didn't get cut but taxes did get raised. The other team raises taxes to spend the money; they don't raise taxes for some other purpose, so if you give them the tax increases, they will spend the resources.
In 1994, Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate and all but a handful signed and kept the pledge to never raise taxes. Republicans learned from painful failure that tax hikes only feed big government and strengthen the party of big government in the United States: the Democrats.
So the Reagan Republican Party became the party that would never raise your taxes. But opposing tax increases is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve limited government.
Reducing spending
The second step is to stop spending so much money. One of the failures of George W. Bush's eight years as president was that he was very good at not raising taxes – but not so good at restraining spending. He had learned the dangers of tax hikes. Bush 43 watched dad raise taxes and lose his bid for re-election in 1992. Dad had been a great president on many things; he managed the collapse of the Soviet Union without a lot of blood on the floor, and kicked Iraq out of Kuwait without getting stuck occupying the place for a decade. There was one problem: he raised taxes. And he threw away a perfectly good presidency as a result.
We did begin to make progress in limiting government spending in 2011. What changed was the arrival of the Tea Party movement. This was a radical change in American politics. It has completed the circle in terms of who sits around the centre-right's 'leave us alone' table.
Before the Tea Party revolt beginning in 2009, most Americans believed that you could not win elections by attacking government overspending. But Americans would organise opposition and win elections once 'spend too much' became 'tax too much'. That was the lesson of the 1978 taxpayer victory of Proposition 13 designed to cut property taxes in California. The California tax increases in the late 1970s were the product of overspending, but the revolt followed the tax hikes not the earlier overspending. Reagan ran for president promising to cut federal spending by $90 billion in 1976 and lost a Republican primary. He won in 1980 and 1984 as the tax cutter. QED. Americans hated tax hikes but not necessarily government spending.
In January 2009, Obama came into power. Within two and a half months, he had threatened to spend trillions – the stimulus and more. The whole point of the stimulus package was to take over $800 billion dollars and throw it in the middle of the 'takings coalition' table to keep everybody happy.
This scared Americans, and we had about a million Americans in the streets demonstrating at between 600 and 800 rallies around the United States on the week of 15 April. This was unprecedented. These were not unemployed students. These were men and women with jobs, lives, families. They had never been in a demonstration. And they were not reacting to tax increases – those were yet to come. They were organising in opposition to government spending.
There have been some very good studies about how this affected the voter turnout in places where you had rallies compared with places where they planned a rally, but it rained, so it was cancelled. You could see that we gained between three million and six million voters in 2010 because of increased political activism: the idea of showing up, seeing other people, realising you weren't alone and that you weren't crazy was very important.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A U-Turn on the Road to Serfdom by Grover Norquist, Nima Sanandaji, Matthew Sinclair, David B. Smith. Copyright © 2014 The Institute of Economic Affairs. Excerpted by permission of IEA.
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