The sovereign's oldest temptation

Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, as reported by Fox News, has made a blunt accusation: that most of his colleagues — including those of his own party — are, in his phrase, "drunk on spending other people's money." I find this language arresting not because it is impolite, but because it is precise. The moral philosopher in me recognizes the condition immediately. When those who spend bear none of the cost of spending, the incentive to spend wisely is extinguished as surely as a lamp deprived of oil.

This was the very error I identified in the conduct of great chartered companies and mercantile lobbies in my own time. The managers of other people's money, I wrote in the Wealth of Nations, cannot be expected to watch over it with the anxious vigilance that a proprietor watches over his own. The principle extends, by plain inference, from the counting house to the legislative chamber. A representative who faces no personal consequence for a billion-dollar appropriation is in structurally the same position as a company director spending shareholders' funds on his own comfort.

Representative Burlison points specifically to healthcare premiums as the mechanism by which this spending disorder injures the ordinary household. I cannot speak with technical authority on the architecture of modern health insurance — the actuarial tables, the network contracts, the subsidy structures — these are instruments of a complexity I could not have foreseen. But I can speak to the institutional logic. When a large and complex market is shaped over decades by legislative preference, subsidy, and restriction, the beneficiaries of those preferences — hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers — organize to defend them. The consumer, dispersed and unorganized, pays the accumulated cost. This is precisely the dynamic I described in the corn trade and the woolen manufacture: a narrow producer interest, through its proximity to the sovereign, extracts a rent from the broad consuming public.

The Congressman's complaint about discretionary income is, at bottom, a complaint about that extraction. When premiums consume an ever-larger share of a household's earnings, the family cannot direct those funds toward the uses it values most. That redirection of spending — away from what the individual judges best for himself, toward what the political process has decided to subsidize — is a loss not merely of money but of agency. It is the consumer's sovereignty that is violated, not merely his wallet.

Yet I must enter a caution against the simple conclusion that spending is always and everywhere the villain. I argued in the Wealth of Nations that defense, justice, public infrastructure, and the education of common people are legitimate and necessary charges on the public revenue — indeed, that a sovereign who neglects them impoverishes the nation as surely as one who wastes its treasure. The question is never merely "how much" but "on what" and "through what institution." Spending that maintains the rule of law under which contracts are kept, or that educates the laboring population whom the division of labor would otherwise reduce to intellectual narrowness, is not waste. It is the condition that makes honest commerce possible.

The institutional question, then, is the one Representative Burlison's charge leaves open: what framework compels those who appropriate public funds to bear some discipline analogous to the discipline the market imposes on the private spender? Legislative budgets are not subject to profit and loss. The corrective must come from transparency, from genuine competition among representatives for the approval of an informed public, and from constitutional or statutory rules that make the cost of spending visible to the voter who ultimately bears it. Without such a framework, the intoxication the Congressman describes will continue — because the drink is free to those who pour it, and the bill falls on those who were never offered a glass.