The Tyranny of the Flywheel

Gaining and keeping power in a democracy is simple: Get more votes than your opponents. If you do this consistently, you can build permanent bureaucracies to institutionalize your agenda, drive money to special interests, and ultimately enhance your power. It’s the flywheel of government growth: Pander to get votes; win elections; use your majority power to build institutions and pass legislation that drive money to special interests and key voting blocs; those groups support you in your next election; the support helps you win. Repeat.

Now imagine that the critical first step in the flywheel (pandering to voters) can be accomplished through a narrow political strategy: Spending. Recent data released from the Tax Foundation notes that a full 60% of Americans consume more government services than they pay in taxes. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center showed that by 2011, 46% of Americans will pay $0 in federal income tax. This group, despite paying nothing into the system, will receive over $40 billion in government services. That’s a pretty good deal.

Even better, according to the most recent data from the IRS, the top 5% of wage earners pay 60% of all income taxes (despite making only 37% of income). Under President Obama’s new tax-and-spend heavy budget, this number will increase year-by-year for the duration of his term.

So, if you were playing the political game, would you target the 5% payers, or the 60% consumers? If you could appease the vast majority of voters by giving free government handouts, would you favor small government or big government?

In a pure democracy, power is gained through votes. Votes are gained by appeasing the greatest number of voters. When the greatest number of voters are consumers of government service rather than payers, expansive liberal policy is simply smart politics. If you want to win, you had better deliver big government. That’s why billions of dollars are wasted each year in pork-filled legislation, why two-thirds of the nearly $800 billion “Stimulus” went directly to special interest groups, and why entitlement programs now consume more GDP than ever before.

In politics, it is much easier to provide handouts than encourage responsibility. It’s much easier to “solve” problems through programs than make hard budgetary reductions. It’s much easier to hand out than to cut back. It’s much easier to give speeches wrapped in rhetoric of “compassion” and “help,” to promise that you will fix, bailout, and save, than to talk about fiscal responsibility, individual liberty, and self-reliance. It’s much easier to cast yourself as savior than as referee. If it is true that “the easiest way to get a vote is to buy a vote,” then liberalism simply makes practical political sense.

The problem, however, is that such a system creates a tyranny of the majority. The rights of 5% are trounced in favor of the political expediency of 60%. Politicians create irreversible entitlements (Social Security, Welfare, ObamaCare), build burgeoning bureaucracies, and pack the court system with activist judges. The political flywheel spins with ever-increasing fury as government grows and grows, until it eventually crumbles under its own malaise, mounting debt, and unsustainable liability. Liberty for some is pushed aside in favor of power for others.

That is why America was not founded as a pure democracy. America was founded as a Constitutionally-constrained Democratic Republic. Certain rights were to be inalienable, no matter the shifting tide of public sentiment or the growth of special interests. Personal property rights, the right to keep what you earn, to be taxed only when absolutely necessary, were to be protected by immutable Constitutional law. Our founders knew that unconstrained government always tends toward growth—men have always longed for increased power. That’s why our founders outlined limited places government could intervene and spend, and sought to isolate the major branches from one another. Sadly, we’ve drifted so far from Constitutional constraint that our country—yes, even America—is rapidly being consumed by the weight of the political flywheel.

The center-left Tax Policy Center recently ran data models to show what it would take to stabilize the deficit at 2% of GDP (the level economists recommend for long-term stability and economic growth) under President Obama’s new budget. They found that government would have to raise $775 billion in new taxes every year through the duration of his term. If he keeps his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class, the rich (those making more than $200,000 a year) will have to pay 90% of their income in taxes. But, not to worry, they only comprise 5% of the voting public. 

We need leaders committed to principle over power. We need representatives who see themselves as citizens, not politicians. We need a government willing to roll back its unfettered reach, to return our nation to what it was meant to be. We may be at a tipping point for our country, and the stakes have never been higher.

-Matt Benchener is Supervisor of Newtown Township and Founder of TruPolitics.net