There is a prevailing orthodoxy that public spending is good, moral, selfless, and in the public interest, whilst private spending is bad, immoral, selfish and greedy. It’s a view which most government ministers encourage every day, boasting of how much public money they have spent and equating this with a moral vision of the public good. It is a view reinforced by many commentators, most of the BBC’s coverage of modern politics, and even by some Conservatives, so deeply is it engrained in the culture.
Some of the public some of the time fall for it. That’s why so many people tell pollsters they wouldn’t mind paying more tax. It’s the decent thing to say. Fortunately they often don’t mean it, and vote differently when it comes to the privacy of the ballot box. Very few have the courage to question, let alone pour scorn on the proposition that public spending is divine, and private spending a little wicked.
Yet if you pause to examine the proposition, it is absurd. It is full of contradictions. If I spend £1100 out of my heavily taxed income on paying my son’s university fee, I am being amoral or selfish. If I pay more money to the taxman to give a bigger grant to his university, I am being noble and moral. If I earn more to spend more on buying a larger house, so my children can have decent study bedrooms I am being greedy. If I pay more tax so my child tax credit can be increased, I am being altruistic. If my neighbour earns more to send his son to a public school he is being outrageous. If he takes his son away and asks all taxpayers to help pay for his education, he is being reasonable and sociable.
If we look at the things people spend their own money on, it is difficult to categorise much of it as selfish, greedy, wasteful or unreasonable. Most people spend the biggest chunk of their money on providing a roof over the heads of themselves and their families. The next biggest amount is spent on food, so that families can keep body and soul together. People have to spend money on transport to work, on heating, lighting and water and other essentials. None of this seems to fit with the idea that private spending paves the way to hell.
The contrast with some of the things the public sector spends money on couldn’t be starker. It sticks in the throat the realise that you are paying more tax because some ministers want bigger and better drinks cabinets. You can enjoy the morality of paying for more political advisers and spin doctors, and for the whole new army of regulators and administrators.
We are all required to make a contribution to provide salaries of £45,000 a year for a Corporate Governance Manager and a Risk Manager for the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health – a worthless body in its own right. Every week there is up to a hundred pages of public sector jobs, many of them of equal value to these jobs on this new non quango. We had the pleasure of contributing £1000million to the Dome to provide ministers with the UK’s dearest ever New Year’s party. Every day we can watch as millions of our money is spent on a railway that rarely works properly. It is apparently public spirited that between us we pay the Board of Network Rail, the government’s very own new creature, £1,750,000 a year. It was even better that we stumped up over £100 million to pay private sector consultants to advise the government on how to make such a mess of the railways, and another £100 million to split up the London Underground.
Of course, there are a few counter examples. I d not begrudge paying some tax, to ensure that children in poor families to not go without food and shelter. I welcome paying some tax to ensure teachers and doctors throughout the country. I still resent the idea that when I pay this I am a saint and when I seek more of my own money to make the same provision for my own family out of my own resources I am a sinner.
The truth is far more complicated than the usual ministerial and BBC platitudes. Some public spending is a disgrace – it is self serving, wasteful, even absurd. Some private spending is hedonistic: people do want more money to buy a drink or a holiday, but this spending only comes after they have paid the tax bill, the gas bill and the mortgage. An informed public debate would accept that people often want to keep more of their own money for noble reasons. It would certainly accept that public spending is only morally good if it’s well spent on good objectives. All too much of it is very different.
Indeed, we would live in a more moral world if we trusted people more and government less. When you confiscate most of people’s income and distribute it from the centre, as they did in the USSR, you take away practically all scope for individuals to make moral choices with their spending. They assume the state will take care of all the altruism, and have to accept they have no money to spend on others even if they wanted to. Communism, far from being more moral than capitalism, was at best amoral. Set the people free: then charities will flourich, and many charities will begin at home.
