The Election Is About Big Government Getting Bigger
Shortly after this article is published, we will know the outcome of the 2024 presidential campaign. But whether the winner is one or the other of the two major political party candidates, one thing is certain: the intrusive and heavy hand of government will continue to have sway over our lives after the victor is sworn in as the next president of the United States in January 2025.
For a point of comparison, let us look at what the Republican and Democrat Party platforms promised 100 years ago during the 1924 presidential race between Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democratic), along with that of Robert La Follette (Progressive).
The Republican and Democratic Party platforms of 1924
The Republican platform called for continuing a “policy of strict economy” that, under the Warren G. Harding and Coolidge administrations (Harding died in office in 1923, and Coolidge became president), had cut taxes, lowered government spending by 40 percent over the preceding four years, and reduced the national debt by $2.5 billion ($45.5 billion in 2024 dollars), along with running a budget surplus. More of the same was promised if Coolidge was continued in the White House.
In foreign affairs, it was expected that other countries would pay back their wartime debts to the U.S. Treasury. While wishing well to the rest of the world and desirous for global peace through armament-reduction agreements, it was insisted that the United States should not be involved in foreign entanglements that might commit America to military engagements around the globe.
There were some major sore points from a free-market perspective, including the Republican dogmatic insistence on a regime of high American tariff barriers to keep foreign goods out of the United States, in conjunction with other income transfers to agricultural interests. There was a pitch for a strong American-owned merchant marine. In addition, there were proposed government interventions in labor markets for fewer work hours and higher wages. But the platform insisted that American industry should not suffer from government competition or nationalization of public utilities. However, Republicans were very determined to have strongly enforced immigration laws
The Democrat platform of 1924 railed against various instances of high-profile federal government corruption, privilege-giving, and vote buying under Republican rule, especially when Harding was in the White House. The Republicans were said to be concerned with “material things,” while the Democrats, on the other hand, were “concerned chiefly with human rights.” They wanted “honest government,” with more child-labor legislation, stronger antitrust regulation, special farm loan banks, a more “rational” tariff system on imported goods, and greater “tax fairness” through a more progressive income tax to eliminate the “light” tax burden on the “multimillionaires at the expense of other taxpayers.”
While the Republicans called for antilynching laws to protect Black Americans in the South and for a better sense and spirit of respect for equal rights before the law among racial groups in the United States, the Democrats did not make a peep about the southern segregation laws or the violence against southern blacks.
The Democrats also wanted more government control over natural resources in the name of “conservation.” In addition, they wanted to bolster a merchant marine fleet, and, if necessary, through government ownership and operation of such vessels. The Democrats wanted, at the same time, more federal assistance and aid to public schools around the country. They also insisted on vigorous enforcement of the immigration laws, especially against potential migrants from Asia.
Both parties favored the continuation and stricter enforcement of the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution against the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, along with no change with the already existing “war” on narcotics.
The Progressive Party was basically “left” of the Democrats. They wanted tax reductions for everyone except the “multimillionaires,” who were, clearly, not paying their fair share. They wanted federal regulation of railway freight rates to benefit the “distressed” farmers and legislation to guarantee farm incomes. They wanted legal protection and enforcement of labor-union collective bargaining in agriculture and industry and higher pay for postal workers. The Progressives also wanted government ownership of the railways where “necessary,” along with government ownership of the waterways and natural resources.
Growing interventionism, but no massive welfare state
Reading through this brief and abridged summary of the political party platforms of 1924, one can see that all the seeds of increased government control and intervention are already present, with more promised by all three competing parties. The Republicans had cut taxes, reduced government spending, and lowered the national debt. In addition, during the depression of 1920–1921, the Harding administration had basically followed a let-alone policy, allowing markets to correct and rebalance through price-and-wage flexibility and production readjustments to the post–World War I economic circumstances.
But both Republicans and Democrats had their special-interest groups to which they catered and from whom they expected electoral support through campaign contributions and votes on election day. It’s just that they focused on different actual and potential interest groups. Following Harding’s death in 1923, a variety of Washington scandals emerged that highlighted that the Republicans believed in using taxpayer money to benefit their “friends.” In addition, Herbert Hoover was a mainstay of the Republican establishment in the 1920s as a proponent of social engineering in his role as secretary of commerce through “rationalization of business,” which really amounted to the case for government-business partnerships and regulations to limit “excessive” and “wasteful” competition in pursuit of the national interest.
The Democrats were driven by more collectivist ideological influences, which the Progressive Party reflected even more. They wanted more of Woodrow Wilson’s centralization of federal power and authority to remake America in a more socialist direction. They were confident that an elite of “experts” could manage large parts of the society to remake the economic and social fabric of the country. The Democrats, for all their talk about “human rights,” mostly shared the South’s views on racial separation and discrimination. Woodrow Wilson, after all, had reintroduced segregation in federal employment, and many of the leading progressives in the Democratic Party were enthusiasts of eugenics, which they considered merely the cutting edge of “following the science” in the biology of race.
These political and ideological currents were all present when the Great Depression began in 1929 and opened the floodgates for bigger and bigger government, first under the Hoover administration between 1929 and 1932, and most certainly under Franklin D. Roosevelt starting in 1933 with his first New Deal of fascist-style central planning imposed on the American economy.
But when looking at the Republican and Democratic Party platforms of 1924, what is especially of note is what is not mentioned or advocated by either party. There is no call for a federal government-imposed Social Security system; there is no demand for federal government mandated and managed medical insurance or healthcare provision; there is no national minimum-wage law proposal; there is no call for federal housing projects; there is little proposed federal welfare spending or programs to “fight poverty” other than for farmers and schooling; and there is no notion of a government surveillance network to monitor what people said, wrote, or did.
One hundred years ago, in 1924, the political parties did not even raise any of these things, even in rhetorical “trial balloons,” because it was still taken for granted that the American people — across the political spectrum — did not consider these among the legitimate functions of the federal government under the U.S. Constitution. State governments might experiment with various interventionist policies and programs as part of the decentralized system of federalism. But the national government in Washington, D.C., was presumed to have little or no role or place in these matters.
In the arena of foreign affairs, all three political parties espoused the cause of world peace, spoke of conferences for the mutual reduction of armaments as a way to avoid and limit wars, and offered American cooperation in these directions but without any U.S. treaty or other commitment to foreign alliances or world peace-keeping organizations. In fact, there was a clear desire to resist anything that might draw the United States into global conflicts. And most certainly there was no presumption or proposal for America to play the role of policeman of the world with the needed domestic bureaucracies and powers to implement such a system of foreign political and military interventionism.
However, America had been drifting over the preceding 25 years following the beginning of the 20th century in a more interventionist direction, both at home and abroad. Federal regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, a federal income-tax amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the establishment of a central bank, the Federal Reserve System, had come into existence during the Woodrow Wilson administration. The United States had begun to play a global role through the fruits of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, a permanent naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and the annexing of the Philippine Islands in East Asia). There also were various military interventions and occupations of some countries in Central America (Nicaragua) and the Caribbean (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) during that time.
But in 1924, the United States was still, in terms of the size and scope of the federal government, in the afterglow of the founding of the country. In that year, federal government expenditures were about $3.2 billion ($58.2 billion in 2024 dollars), with tax revenues of around $3.4 billion ($61.8 billion in 2024 dollars), resulting in a $200 million budget surplus ($3.6 billion in 2024 dollars). The national debt in 1924 was only $21.2 billion ($385 billion in 2024 dollars), down from $25.9 billion in 1920 ($471 billion in 2024 dollars), for a nearly 20 percent decrease in the national debt burden. Net federal outlays in 1924 were barely equal to 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Big government and the Republican platform of 2024
Now, fast forward to 2024. What a difference a hundred years makes! The Congressional Budget Office’s latest update on the federal government’s budgetary outlook calculated government expenditures of $6.805 trillion dollars for the fiscal year ending on September 30, 2024, with federal revenues totaling $4.890 trillion, resulting in a $1.915 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year. For fiscal year 2024, federal tax revenues equaled 17.3 percent of GDP, while federal outlays came to 24.2 percent of GDP. The budget deficit was 7 percent of GDP, while net interest payments on the national debt were equal to 3.1 percent of GDP.
Under both Republicans and Democrats, the federal government has become gargantuan over the last 10 decades. This is seen in the promises and proposals the Republicans and Democrats have made in their 2024 party platforms. The Republicans have returned with a vengeance to their protectionist past under the influence of Donald Trump, with the party bemoaning the supposed loss of jobs and industry due to foreign imports into America. Everywhere there is supposedly economic decline, American “greatness” lost. The party’s answer is higher tariffs on imported goods from virtually all parts of the world, but especially from China. The cost to American consumers and producers who use imported goods in the form of higher prices and fewer competitive alternatives has little meaning for Trump; nor does he worry about the counter-tariffs other countries may impose as retaliation, which will exacerbate the economic harm done to everyone.
The other main focus of the Republicans is on the southern border and on illegal immigrants. Nearly everyone crossing over to the United States is tagged as a drug dealer, a rapist, or violent gang member. There is to be a vast round up of millions of people, regardless of how long they have been here or how peaceful and productive they may have been. This would be one of the largest compulsory mass expulsions of people in the last 100 years.
It is said that government immigration control and deportations will assure that “foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists [are kept] out of America.” In some places in the world, such forced deportations have been referred to as “ethnic cleansing.” Trump’s version is ideological cleansing. If only he could deport all those native and home-grown commies. But wait, to where could they be sent, since they are, well, “born in the USA” Americans? The Soviets would domestically deport “enemies of the people” to Siberia. Maybe an isolated, desolate corner of Alaska could work!
For all of Donald Trump’s rhetoric about America being militarily and politically too engaged in too many places in the world, another call in the platform is for more “defense” spending to enlarge U.S. military capability. This also means government subsidization through “defense” contracts of an enlarged segment of American industry devoted to military manufacturing at taxpayers’ expense. Republicans want to assure a virtual autarky —national self-sufficiency — in the means and ends of warfare. With the U.S. annual “defense” budget already nearing a trillion dollars, the immense diversion of productive resources from market-oriented uses would only be worsened under Trump.
This is accompanied by an implicit national industrial policy not only in war material but also in energy manufacturing. Trump says “drill-baby-drill” for fossil fuels. But this is not merely allowing a free, competitive market to determine what sources of energy production and consumption are found to be most economically useful and efficient by consumers and producers. No, this, too, is an implicit central plan to direct resources and production into those forms of energy supply that Trump considers best for making America “great again.” It is a part of Trump’s version of central planning.
The Republican platform also talks about breaking up the drug-related violent gang warfare on American streets and cities. This would also necessitate adding to the country’s prison population in the process of cracking down. But nowhere in the platform is any reference made to the underlying cause for much of the violence that plagues American communities: the government’s own “war on drugs.”
By criminalizing and banning the use of various drugs and narcotics in the face of consumer demands for them, it merely drives the business into the black market, where it very profitability creates the incentives for drug cartels and dealers, along with corruption and violence. The far better way to solve drug-dealing crime is to end the war on drugs, that is, repeal the drug laws and thereby decriminalize it. The black market and all the negative effects would disappear practically overnight. But to do so would run counter to the long-standing Republican insistence that various aspects of human conduct have to be policed by the government to make people more “virtuous.”
The Republican platform also promises to bring down price inflation through reducing government regulation, increasing domestic energy supplies, cutting “wasteful spending,” “securing the borders, and restoring Peace through Strength.” While making markets more open and competitive certainly can reduce costs on the supply-side, how adding to government expenditures on border control through the use of the U.S. military or expanding military spending in general helps bring down price inflation is not explained.
The connection between rising prices and monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve to help fund the trillions of dollars of deficit spending is glossed over, since the Republicans make a point of promising no reductions — Trump “will not cut one penny” — in either Social Security or Medicare expenditures. These are the largest components of the government’s budget and the threats to financial stability in the longer run
At the same time, the Republican platform promises government supported “affordable housing,” lower-cost education, a restoring of the American auto industry, “buy American” policies for more American jobs, encouraging a “reindustrialization” of America, and a whole grab-bag of government goodies, including government curriculum planning of public schools to “prepare students for successful lives and well-paying jobs.” How the Republicans know what and how to centrally plan all these things is not revealed. Maybe they should consult with all those foreign-born communists, Marxists, and socialists before they are deported.
Democrats dream of ever-bigger government
Democrats began their 2024 party platform with the usual virtue signaling. In this instance, a tone of respect and implicit apology for the fact that the Chicago convention was occurring on the lands of “indigenous peoples,” the “tribal nations” who had been the “stewards” of the land before the evil Europeans appeared and destroyed the Rousseauian image of the world of the “noble savage,” untouched by Western civilization.
The choice facing America, the Democrats said, was more freedom or less; more rights or fewer ones; an economy for the many or the few. All the usual clichés are there — for example, removing a “trickle-down” tax code benefiting only “the rich.” The usual fear tactics, for example, that the Republicans will slash Social Security and Medicare, leaving the old, the sick and “the needy,” obviously, to die in the streets — in spite of the fact that the Republicans have made it clear that they are as prowelfare and proredistribution as the statist Democrats. The Republicans will just make it all work better in a “business-like” fashion.
In a 100-page grab-bag of promises, programs, and projects, the Democrats affirm that they have never met a government intervention, regulation, or redistribution they did not like. Especially a woman’s right to an abortion, but only if it is at someone else’s expense, that is, the taxpayers; how can you have a “right” if someone else is not picking up the tab for you to have it? After all, isn’t that what “freedom” means — never having to personally bear any cost for all things your heart desires? This is what the Democrats mean by America as a land of opportunity. All for “free.” Only in America, what a country!
After four years of worsening inflation caused by even many more years of monetary expansion to cover trillions of dollars of government deficits, the Democrat platform assures the American people that it is all due to greedy businessmen pushing up the prices at which goods and services are sold in the marketplace. But don’t worry, with Kamala Harris’s anti-gouging laws — read, old fashioned and always failing price controls — the “little guy” will be protected from “the rich” and the financial hardships of everyday life.
Fortunately, whenever Democrats are in political power, the sky opens and manna falls from heaven that enables them, as they promise, to rebuild “our roads, bridges, ports, airports, water systems, electric grids, broadband, and more, paving the way for a great American ‘Infrastructure Decade’ that will create hundreds of thousands of good-paying union jobs.” Notice, not just any job, a “good-paying union” job. Yes, private-sector jobs are so miserable that that must explain why union membership in the private sector has decreased from 20.1 percent of the workforce in 1983 to only 10 percent in 2023. In the government sector, union membership is 32.5 percent. Of course, government can offer “good-paying union” jobs to the “servants of the people” because the revenue to do so comes through compulsory taxation or borrowed money, adding to the debt.
The Democrats almost sound like those evil Republicans when they tell us in their platform that they will bring home manufacturing and “cutting-edge industries” from abroad. The government’s all-wise and all-knowing central planning hands will direct all that manufacturing and those industries into “building renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other green technologies here at home.” There will be new industries, technological innovations, and “game-changing medical cures and treatments,” thanks to the paternalistic efforts of the Biden-Harris administrations.
One almost has that burst of emotional excitement that ordinary Soviet citizens must have felt when directed by Comrade Stalin and the five-year central plans to conjure up new industrial cities in the middle of the arctic north of Russia and Siberia, powered by mighty hydroelectric dams constructed with the forced labor of the “enemies of the people.” After all, Kamala Harris’s father has been an actual-to-goodness Marxist/post-Keynesian professor at Stanford University. Who better to learn from than one’s own dad about a bright, beautiful future under the guiding hand of government. Race and ethnic identity groups of America unite! You have nothing to lose but your individual identities and personal responsibilities for your life. “Freedom! Freedom!”
This will be helped by a mandatory national $15 minimum wage and government-assisted compulsory union membership in more sectors of the American economy. Well, if you cannot win over workers through open ballots to impose unionism on businesses, then just turn to the coercive hand of government. Nothing works on getting people to see things your way like using the police powers of the state. While they’re at it, the Democrats declare in their platform that “the U.S. Postal Service is the world’s most efficient,” and to prove it, they will “fight all efforts to privatize it” and “protect its universal service obligation.” The latter point refers to doing all in their continuing power to exclude private mailing services from directly handling “first class” mail.
And what is a Democrat Party platform without more promises and programs to “fight poverty?” They will expand the food-stamp program, have larger child tax credits and earned-income tax credits, along with more spending on the public school system and on affordable housing. There will be increased spending on public-transit systems, more “affordable banking,” and multiples of other projects, including imposing price ceilings on pharmaceuticals and deciding what medical services people shall receive to prevent private health care from cheating them. All of this is made possible “when we help one another” through the coercive fist of government.
Taxes will be cut for the lower-income groups and raised for the higher-income groups. The Democrats must have just cut and pasted this from their 1924 party platform. They will close loopholes to prevent passing on wealth to a younger generation, raise corporate taxes, impose a 4 percent tax on stock buybacks, and increase funding for the IRS even more to make sure that none of those dirty rich people hide a dollar that should be in the government’s hands.
Daycare will be subsidized by the federal government to assure that “working families” do not pay more than $10-a-day per child. Higher pay will be pushed for caregivers in the medical and related sectors. The “quality of care and quality of life” for nursing-home residents will be guaranteed. Paid leave for raising children will be mandated, “guaranteeing every American worker up to 12 weeks of paid time off to care for a new child or a loved one to recover from an illness.”
Due to space limitations, not even half of the giveaways enumerated in the Democrat Party platform can be fully mentioned here. However interventionist and statist the Republican Party platform may be — and it most certainly is — the Democrats pass them by miles. After reading through the entire document (just call me a masochist), it would be easier to try to make up a list of those aspects of human life that the Democrats would not control and command in one way or another.
Ok, yes, they do not have a program telling you with whom to have intimate sexual relations; no affirmative action program for this one — yet! After all, what about those marginalized people in society who no one is voluntarily willing to have sex with. Doesn’t this discriminated-against group have a “right” to sex, too? Oh, the inhumanity of the laissez-faire society! But there is always the next election cycle, when the “progressives” have to figure out something new to add to their “freedom” platform to gain the votes of the sexually deprived.
Socialist Democrats and fascist Republicans
Political labels are always loosely bandied about during election campaigns for both describing yourself and tarring your opponent. Commentators in the mainstream media have sneered when Kamala Harris has been called by Trump and other Republicans a Marxist, a communist, or a socialist. But if the platform you run on, and the policies of the presidential administration you have been the number two person in, have implemented and proposed ever-more command and control over economic and social affairs, it is hard not to be considered an advocate of the governmentally planned society.
The Democrats have been free and easy with their condemnations of Donald Trump as a fascist, a dictator, a “threat to democracy.” Trump has made himself an easy target for this when he says that he likes and gets along with “strong men” like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping and suggests that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un misses him. Of course, the Democrats were saying in 2016 that within a few weeks of Trump’s taking office in 2017, Nazi-like Brown Shirts would be parading down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., arms raised in a fascist-style salute. Somehow I seemed to have missed seeing that on CNN.
But he did act like a fascist-type central planner, telling businesses that they better come back to America and create jobs here or there could be “consequences.” He tried to strong arm the Ukrainian government to get “the dirt” on Hunter Biden’s business dealings in that country. He instituted the COVID lockdowns and shutdowns that ground the American economy to a halt, and he spent the first “emergency” trillions of dollars trying to counteract the disaster he created. And let us not forget his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
Once at a White House press conference in November 2018, Trump said to correspondent James Acosta, “Honestly, I think you should let me run the country, and you run CNN.” Run the country? Who sounds like the arrogant central planning socialist? I wrote at the time:
In other words, President Trump considers it his job to direct or at least influence the types and numbers of jobs available and created in the U.S. economy. He thinks that he is supposed to determine or nudge where American businesses are located and to what manufacturing and other activities they should be devoted. He views it as his responsibility to decide who can come into the United States, from what parts of the world, and in what numbers. He believes it to be his responsibility (within his conception of “America First”) to decide where in the world the U.S. government should be politically, militarily, and financially influencing or determining foreign governments and the policies they follow.
Trump’s critics among the “progressives” and the Democrat Party may vehemently dislike and disagree with the content that he gives to these policy issues, but virtually all of them would agree that these issues are part of the job description of the president of the United States. They just want someone else to be in the Oval Office filling in the policy blanks to these issues in a way slightly or greatly different from how Donald Trump does. In other words, President Trump and his critics all believe that someone should be running the country.
This is the dilemma we face in this presidential election, as we have in far too many elections in the past, and no doubt when looking to presidential elections in the foreseeable future. Both political parties and their presidential leaders cannot imagine a political landscape in which governments do not “run the country,” which means running our lives. It is this mindset, no matter how ingrained in people’s minds it may seem to be, that true friends of freedom must devote their unceasing efforts to overcome.
This article was originally published in the November 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.
The post The Election Is About Big Government Getting Bigger appeared first on The Future of Freedom Foundation.
