RALEIGH — Government is too big and does too much.
Shocking as this sentiment may be to some readers (whose web addresses probably bear a telltale suffix like “gov” or “edu”) it is neither a revolutionary nor a rare one. More often than not, when pollsters ask American voters whether they would prefer a larger government with more “services” and taxes or a smaller one with fewer services and taxes, voters opt for the latter model. Of course, many of these same voters endorse on a case-by-case basis precisely the kind of big-government programs, such as old-age entitlements or programs “for the children,” that expand the size and cost of government, but such an inconsistency is deserving of a full treatment on another day.
My point today is that you can hold the sentiment I expressed above and not be “anti-government,” as some pejoratively put it. You can strongly believe, as I do, that there are some functions government must carry out to protect the freedom and security of its citizens.
For example, for more than half a century the federal government has poured taxpayer dollars into grants to universities for a variety of research and education activities. Don’t worry — I haven’t lost my head. Much of this has been entirely extra-constitutional and entirely unnecessary. Billions of federal dollars have gone to subsidize activities best left to private companies, private donors, and students pursuing a (presumably) valuable education.
But not all of it is outside the proper scope of federal action, because it has to do with national defense. Our military capabilities have been and continue to be enhanced by tax-funded research in obvious areas such as physical and space science, computer technology, and biochemistry but also in less-obvious areas such as textiles, psychology, and foreign-language instruction. A vibrant free market for products and information would already generate a lot of dual-use technologies and ideas to benefit our national defense, but you don’t have to be a misguided welfare-economics maven to comprehend why there are some promising areas of inquiry that might not be adequately followed if the only potential applications were private.
The problem is that even when these kinds of government expenditures are justified in a constitutional republic, they are often poorly administered. Fevered theories of a “military-industrial complex” aside, there are plenty of cases of graft, corruption, and ineptitude in military contracting and military-based R&D projects. With regard to federal funds for universities, politicians have frequently pursued policies not with national security in mind but as a way of slapping pork on the plates of key academic and related communities back home.
The Christian Science Monitor printed a story recently about the millions of dollars Washington spends every year subsidizing foreign-language and international-studies programs in America’s colleges and universities, and the controversy building over how best to ensure its effective use. Rather than continuing to ladle these dollars out, year after year, with little prospect of a direct return in areas such as intelligence, the diplomatic service, and the uniformed military, several members of Congress want to change the legislation to track where the students they subsidize end up, and what is done with federal research dollars. Universities are up in arms about the proposal, in public complaining that the federal government could abuse such a system to punish scholars whose political views disagree with the prevailing political wisdom. This is mostly phony — the real issue, I suspect, is that they don’t want to have to be accountable for how they are spending these dollars.
But in a sense, the political debate over what kind of strings to attach to these international-studies dollars misses the point. The mechanism itself is flawed. Rather than handing out money to universities, strings or no strings, Congress should instead set up a system whereby students who pursue degrees or skills in key fields — Arab-language study comes to mind, for example, as does the study of Central Asian cultures — receive large signing bonuses if they then go to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, or the military. These bonuses should be large enough substantially to pay off any debts the students have incurred in pursuing their education. Similarly, research funds could flow to promising work in particular fields, paid at publication or to academics acting as direct consultants.
Colleges and universities would still benefit, albeit indirectly, from such federal expenditures because their undergraduate or graduate students would be motivated by the potential for financial gain to pursue off-the-beaten-track studies diligently. Along the way, they’ll be taking other clases and generally increasing the size and budgets of university departments. But if federal politicians think they can give money directly to university administrators or departments and then hope to control directly what they do with it, I’d be willing to bet they’ll be in for a rude awakening.
When you subsidize, optimize and privatize. And when in doubt, stay out.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.