Conservatives are forever looking to cut spending. We can’t afford to finance public education, they argue, or infrastructure maintenance, or the arts. Privatize them; if they can’t pay for themselves, they deserve to die.
But we used to be able to pay for all of these things, and then some. We gave whole generations of Americans college educations, whether through the GI Bill or via low cost state colleges and universities. We built highways, bridges, airports, public transit systems, all at public expense. We won World War II and financed the rebuilding of Europe. We sent men to the moon.
Now conservatives say we can’t afford public schools, let alone public colleges and universities. Let the users carry the whole cost, they say. Make highways into tollways; shut down Amtrak and local public transit. Privatize air traffic control. If there isn’t enough demand for these things to make it profitable for private enterprises to do them, then maybe we don’t need them.
Nixon pulled the plug on the Apollo program; it was too expensive. He was also the one who forced the U.S. off the gold standard, by the way, for the same reason.
We can’t afford Medicare of Social Security, we’re told. The refrain is always the same: they’re too expensive. Yet we’ve lived with these programs for decades; now suddenly they’re too expensive? We’ve had free public education in America since the seventeenth century; now that’s too expensive?
As for Amtrak, that’s a service that used to be provided by private railroads, right? Yes, but they were always heavily subsidized. Mail contracts were the principal source of revenue for many passenger trains, which is why so many of them disappeared when the Post Office abruptly cancelled the mail contracts in 1967. The lands that many of our railroads were built on had been provided at public expense, especially in the western states. There is no form of transportation in the history of this country that hasn’t been heavily subsidized, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System. The airline industry has been the beneficiary of decades of public investment in aviation technology.
And now we’re told we can’t afford any of it any more.
Donald Trump has taken the traditional conservative positions a step further: he says we can’t afford NATO, NAFTA, and many of our other foreign commitments any more. America first, he cries. When the Roman empire pulled out of what is now Romania, and soon afterwards began inviting Franks and Goths to occupy depopulated borderlands in exchange for military service, it was because Rome no longer could afford to keep up its long time imperial commitments. America under Trump is merely following in the footsteps of other empires in decline.
Conservatives, of course, do not see any of this in their proposals; they imagine a return to the spectacular growth of the postwar decades, if only they can somehow remove what they see as the crippling burden of taxes and regulations on the rich, who would otherwise become the engines of a new American renaissance. But this is a fantasy, a pipe dream; the rich have been taxed and regulated far less in the past forty years than they were during the postwar economic boom, and we have seen no new renaissance. Privatizing the highways and pulling out of NATO will no more “make American great again” than resettling Franks and Goths in Roman territory sparked a rebirth of Roman power. Very little that is relinquished can ever be reacquired. The end of Obamacare will mark the beginning of the collapse of health care in America; the privatization of public schools will accelerate the dumbing down of the American people. Will Americans ever set foot on the moon again? Probably not, unless they are invited there by the Chinese.
Do we have a choice? Yes, we do. The relative decline of American wealth and power relative to the rest of the world is probably inevitable, but we can manage the trajectory and consequences of that decline by making intelligent choices about how to invest our wealth, resources, and labor, both in the public and private sectors. The pointless wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, for instance, would be first on my list of cuts. There is nothing to be gained by victory in any of these countries, even if victory were achievable. The locals should be left to settle their own differences, even at the price of allowing people we find odious their temporary triumphs. The money we save can be reinvested at home: in the promotion of learning, in the construction and maintenance of public infrastructure, in the preservation and improvement of our health, and, yes, in culture and the arts.
What is a conservative, if not a man who unwittingly sows the seeds of his own decline and fall?