The ledger does not flatter the spender merely because the spender means well

National Review brings word from California that organized labor — a force formidable enough to move legislation, set wages, and bend a governor's ear — may be on the verge of defeating itself through the very initiative it championed. Another tax on high incomes, another promise that this time the money will hold. I confess I find the story familiar in the way that a fire in a print shop is familiar: the details change; the cause does not.

The principle I tried to press on my neighbors in Philadelphia was plain: a government, like a household, grows solvent by producing more than it consumes and by keeping an honest account of both sides of the ledger. The laboring man who earns ten shillings and spends twelve is not rescued by earning eleven. California, by inference from this report, has mastered the art of spending ahead of whatever revenue it contrives — and then returning to the electorate with a new contrivance. At some point the electorate notices the pattern.

I am not indifferent to the condition of working people — I was a working person, and a tradesman before I was anything else. The unions that press for decent wages and safe conditions perform a service that a healthy commerce ought to welcome rather than resist. But there is a difference between securing fair terms for labor and treating the state treasury as an inexhaustible patron. The first strengthens the tradesman; the second, if the money runs short, leaves everyone poorer and more cynical.

National Review observes, as inference from its lead, that voters are growing skeptical of the tax-the-rich formula precisely because the promised benefits have not reliably materialized. I would put it this way: credit extended on the strength of future virtue is a gamble, and the gambler who loses once can borrow again on a promise — but the lender grows cautious after the third default. Voters are the lenders here. They have extended credit before.

The deeper lesson, and I mark this as my own inference rather than anything the article states directly, is that a movement earns authority in proportion to the discipline it demonstrates over its own appetites. Labor's political capital is real, but capital spent faster than it is earned disappears — whether the currency is coin, paper, or votes.

A counsel for anyone watching this closely: Before supporting any new levy, however worthy its destination, ask first what has become of the last one. Audit before you appropriate. That is not hostility to the public good; it is the condition under which the public good can actually be achieved.