The price of freedom

Imagine, if you will, public life without government grants.

Why would anyone refuse free money?  Isn't that like cutting one's own throat?  Maybe it is the opposite.  It is taking control of one's city, county or state by not letting a bigger fish - usually the federal government, Metro, sometimes foundations and government sponsored organizations - dictate how money is spent and what lesser government's goals and outcomes should be.  Maybe independence starts with freedom from dependence on "free money."

Won't smaller government's go broke or have to raise taxes if grant money is refused?  That depends upon if they can adjust spending to match local revenue.  There are a lot of ways to do this that have been politically untouchable, like privatizing public services and getting out from under union contracts and public pension costs or eliminating popular programs that are not essential.  Freedom has a price.

When children grow up, eventually they establish their independence by supporting themselves.  Once that transition is made, parents have no practical control over what their children do.  Parents and children who keep the financial apron strings attached create a dependency that gets harder and harder to overcome.  This is a simplistic way to describe what has happened to the individual's relationship with government, as well as local and state governments' relationships with the federal government.  We lose the ability to determine our own future by following someone else's goals.

Below is a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2015 about the dangers of government grants.  What goes for the states, goes for local governments too.

Spenders Appeal to Human Nature
State reforms won't change the human desire for more "free money."
By James Gottschalk, Tequesta, Florida

Re­gard­ing Steve Moore’s “The Tax-Cut­ting Boon Sweep­ing the States” (op-ed, Jan. 30): These state re­forms won’t change the hu­man desire for more “free money.” The sugar daddy of Un­cle Sam will con­tinue to step to the fore to sat­isfy these hu­man and po­lit­i­cal be­hav­iors, the states’ rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Con­gress bat­tling for their slice of the ba­con to bring home, tax and spend­ing re­form ide­ology be damned.

What’s to be done? Fed­eral con­trol of the U.S. bud­get also leaks into federal con­trol of state bud­gets through block grants, tar­geted grants with fed­eral stip­u­la­tions, Med­icaid ex­pansion through ObamaCare, un­funded man­dates and over­reg­u­la­tion. These same gov­er­nors and their leg­is­la­tures insti­tut­ing ra­tio­nal tax and spend­ing pol­icy at home need to steel the spines of their rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Congress to re­sist and re­peal laws that bol­ster fed­eral con­trol over the dole to the states, start­ing with the horse-trad­ing of quid pro quo pork amendments. They also need to steel their own spines and resist the al­lure of “free money” where they have the uni­lat­eral power to do so; re­ject­ing stip­u­lated block grants and the ex­pansion of Med­icaid would be a good start.

There must be a re­align­ment of po­lit­i­cal power struc­tures back to a more fed­er­al­ist struc­ture; and that re­align­ment starts with the states rec­og­niz­ing, re­spect­ing and re­cov­ering their rights un­der the 10th Amend­ment.