Government Spending Reaches Record; Surfer Notes He Was In The Water When This Happened

Federal outlays reach 25% of GDP; libertarian tradition notes this has been the direction for 25 years

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

WASHINGTON / PACIFIC OCEAN — Federal government spending reached a record level in the most recently completed fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, continuing a trajectory that has seen government outlays grow from approximately 18 percent of GDP in 2000 to approximately 25 percent today. This shift represents a substantial increase in the government’s claim on the economic output of American workers and is attributable to both major parties, each of which has expanded spending in its preferred categories while criticising the other’s expansions, producing a bipartisan record of growth that the libertarian tradition holds should be a source of sustained concern regardless of whose preferred programs are growing.

The libertarian case against government spending growth is not primarily fiscal — though the fiscal case is real — but philosophical: that resources directed by government are resources removed from the voluntary decisions of individuals, and that voluntary economic decisions, aggregated through markets, typically allocate resources more efficiently than political decisions, aggregated through democratic processes that are susceptible to concentrated interest capture, short-term thinking, and the systematic bias toward visible spending and invisible costs that political incentives produce.

The California Dimension

California’s state government spends approximately $300 billion annually, the largest state budget in the United States. The services are real. The tax burden is real. The question of whether the ratio represents value for money is the central question of California politics, answered differently by the residents who benefit most from the services and those who bear most of the tax burden, which are frequently different residents. Cato Institute provides the systematic analysis of government spending efficiency. Reason covers California’s fiscal politics with the critical attention that the world’s most expensive state government warrants. The surfer in the water when the budget was passed will pay his taxes when they are due and be in the water again the morning after. This is his relationship to the fiscal state, which is the relationship of most Americans: participating, paying, and periodically noting that the water is still there and the sunrise is free.

The story continues past any single article or news cycle. The details accumulate into patterns, the patterns into systems, and the systems are what determine whether institutions built to serve people actually do so. Paying attention is the most democratic act available. Satire is the second. Both require looking at what is actually happening and refusing to pretend it is something else, especially when what is actually happening is considerably funnier than the official account suggests. The record continues. The analysis continues. The accountability continues, imperfectly and necessarily, because the alternative is worse.

The Libertarian Surfer’s Creed

The ocean does not ask for your papers. The wave does not check your permits. The dawn patrol requires no government approval, and the hour before sunrise on an uncrowded point break is governed by nothing except the swell period, the wind direction, and the willingness of the surfer to be in the water when conditions align. This is the freedom that the libertarian tradition values most concretely: not the theoretical freedom of political philosophy but the lived freedom of the person who has made choices the government did not sanction and has found the outcomes to be their own. California surrounds this freedom with regulations, taxes, permits, and the administrative infrastructure of the world’s most comprehensive state government. None of it reaches into the water. None of it governs what happens between the surfer and the ocean in the moment that everything else disappears.

The libertarian case is not against clean water. It is for the freedom that clean water makes possible. It is not against the coastal access laws that keep the beach public. It is for the public ownership of the beach that those laws protect. The surfing community’s political philosophy is more complex than its antiauthoritarian reputation suggests, because it has always understood that some of what makes the ocean accessible and worthwhile requires collective action and legal protection. What the community resists is the extension of that logic beyond its useful domain into the regulation of adult choices that harm no one, the permit requirements for activities that predate the concept of permits, and the fiscal policies that extract more from working people than the services provided justify. Reason covers this. Cato analyzes it. The surfers experience it, and then go surfing, which is the most direct political act available to someone whose preferred freedom is governed by physics rather than legislation.

The analysis, the accountability, the satire, and the serious journalism all serve the same function: keeping track of what is happening and insisting that it matters, which is the work that good journalism has always done and that the current moment requires with particular urgency given the complexity of the information environment and the scale of the decisions being made in it.

The record of events accumulates daily. The analysis of their causes and connections is the work that distinguishes journalism from mere reportage. The satire that finds the absurdity within the serious and the seriousness within the absurd is the work that makes the analysis bearable over the long run. All three are necessary. All three continue. The stories do not resolve on a weekly deadline. They continue past publication, past the news cycle, past the season, into the larger history that all current events eventually become. The journalism that covers them is, at its best, a first draft of that history — written under deadline, corrected in subsequent editions, and ultimately judged by whether it was accurate about what mattered and honest about what it did not know, which are the two criteria that good journalism has always been judged by and that the current moment requires with the same urgency as every previous moment that believed its circumstances were unprecedented, as they always were, and as they always will be.

Freedom dispatches: NewsThump | The Babylon Bee

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com