Government Spending as a Measure of Individual Freedom

I am a rational individualist.  As such, I cherish the ability to make the decisions of what my own values in life are and how I will achieve them.  Basically, I want as much control over my life as possible, without infringing upon the equal rights of others to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are now voting or about to vote in a major national election, which as such elections are wont to do, will bear on the ways and broad degree in which governments will exercise control over our lives.  The core legitimate function of governments is to prevent others from depriving us of our individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  There is a small sphere of other functions of governments which extends to cover situations in which the scale of resources required to address a problem of the general welfare and/or the range over which that issue extends is so great that only governments can reasonably handle them.  In this set of functions, I would include a role in transportation systems, international trade, pandemics, the mail in the early USA, and dangerous substances and pollutants.  However, our governments are much, much too bossy and controlling today.

Our governments take and spend far too much of the money those of us in the private sector earn through our hard work.  We ought to be very conscious that the money they take is a taking of many hours of our lives.  The taking of those hours represents a very real form of enslavement.  Governments do not stop with taxation.  They require endless paperwork, especially directed at businesses in the private sector.  They also make many irrational laws that limit our choices.  These limitations on our choices may totally deny us the pursuit of perfectly valid values or they make us pursue them in very inefficient ways.

As a rational individualist, when I face an election, my primary focus is on how can I vote to minimize the growth of governments, which I believe are uniformly too damn big.  As the population of a country grows and as its economy grows, it is reasonable that government will spend more money.  Some of the legitimate functions of government grow as the population grows and some grow as the economy grows.  At least prior to the massive illegal immigration under the Biden administration, the economy has grown in the U.S. faster than the population has grown.  Our governments ought not to have grown faster than GDP in that case.

The GDP is the sum of the private sector economy and that of government spending — federal, state, and local.  A large portion of the control of the governments over the individual can be measured by the amount of government spending.  As noted above, this leaves out the effect of many irrational laws and mandates and of many regulations, so it is only a partial measurement.  Let us examine the size of the federal government and of all government in the United States as a percentage of the GDP:

The most recent data is for the second quarter of 2024.  The Q1 2020 data was used because this preceded the spikes in government spending due to Covid 19.  The Q4 2016 data was chosen since it immediately preceded the Trump administration.  Q1 of 1960 was chosen because that was the earliest Federal Reserve data I readily could find covering All Government Spending and it was within my long memory of life.

I did not think that the U.S. had far too little government in 1960.  If anything, it seemed too big and intrusive even then.  Since then, the federal government percentage of the GDP has grown by a factor of 11.50!  Total federal, state, and local government spending as a percentage of the GDP has increased by a factor of 10.67.  Total government spending is now 43.74% of GDP, while federal government spending alone is 29.56% of GDP.

I very much feel the reduction in my freedom that has been caused by this insane increase in the size of government.  This added spending comes with ever-increasing laws and mandates, regulations, hours of paperwork, and a host of infractions of our many and broad individual rights.  Governments are imposing restrictions on our freedom of speech, our freedom of association, our freedom of assembly and the right to petition governments when they err, our property rights, our privacy, our ability to educate ourselves and our children, our ability to earn a living, our freedom to pursue excellent health care, our freedom to invest money, our independent opinions (pandemics, so-called climate change, history, Marxism, and so-called social justice), and the equality before the law of individuals no matter what their ethnic origins may be.

The private sector allows us the broadest freedom of choice that can be available to us.  Government when expanded beyond its core legitimate functions, reduces that freedom of choice.  Government has the monopoly on the use of force.  When we turn to government to do something, we do so for the purpose of unleashing that use of force or at the least the threat of using it.  I prefer a society in which force plays as minimal a part as possible.  In fact, government is supposed to do just that.  It is supposed to minimize the use of force — not to become the biggest, most threatening brute in the nation.  Unfortunately, irrational, dangerous brutes are exactly what our governments have become.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of growing governments way beyond their rational limits.  Nonetheless, it is the Democrats who are almost always seeking to spend the most and seeking the most control over our lives.  The Democrat Party has always been the party of slavery.  When a party acts to prevent another such restriction of our individual rights, it is usually the Republican party.  I believe this is still the current case.  Republicans are usually more interested in individual rights than are Democrats.  The Democrats used the Covid 19 pandemic (even after it was over) and their false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming as excuses to massively expand government budgets and controls.  This is in accordance with their maxim that no crisis should ever go to waste as an excuse to expand the role and size of government.

This expanding role is very evident in the employment statistics that show that most of the hiring for many months has been for government jobs and for the health care industry, now principally run and controlled by governments.  There will be no way to even pretend that the people are not enslaved when governments employ everyone or completely control every industry in America.  We know how that has turned out in the USSR, Nazi Germany, Red China, Cuba, and Venezuela.  Despite all of these historical lessons, the Democrat party is eagerly pursuing a mixed Marxist and Fascist model for governing the United States of America.  This effort must be opposed at the polls if we are not to lose the ability to exercise many more of our individual rights necessary to the management of our lives as rational beings.