1
Once I was one of four or five individuals from various locations invited to spend four days at General Motors headquarters in Detroit. The company’s interest was said to be, and seemed to be, to start recruiting new professional employees who were not engineers or accountants, GM’s traditional applicant pool. We were a historian, a writer, an artist, a speech teacher, and a psychologist.
Two things happened within the first two hours of our program that were memorable. First, our host was giving us an overview of our schedule. After our first day there at headquarters, we were to go visit several different manufacturing, design, and testing plants. We were shown a map, and directions were drawn indicating how to drive from our hotel to each site. Our host was astonished, indeed flabbergasted, to learn that none of us had a car with us. I had come by bus, two or three came by train, one local by taxicab, and one local had been dropped off by his wife on her way to work. That was the first memorable event. (After a few phone calls, we were provided with two cars and drivers for the next several days.)
Next on our agenda that first day was an elaborate presentation involving a large model displayed in stages around a large room, several films, and a presenter. The subject was the history of transportation in America, which started with the reasonable assertion that the development of our culture and the progress of our economy were significantly influenced by innovations in transportation technology. As I recall, there was passing reference to the shoddy roads (horsepaths) and inefficient and expensive private tollways of colonial America, before development of shipping along the larger rivers. Perhaps reference was made to the invention of the steamboat.
The first emphasized innovation, as I now remember it, was development of the great canal system, converting the unpredictable and inconsistent riverways into more dependable means of transportation for passengers and especially products. Next came the development of the railroads and finally trucking along modern and ever improving highway systems. This presentation was designed to show how dependent today our economy and our culture had become upon motorized vehicles, the prize products of American private industry.
Major private corporations, one of which of course was General Motors, were continuing to serve us fundamentally and well. We owed everything (or at least a whole lot) to the free enterprise system! At dinner that evening, among ourselves, we discovered that we had all noted the same thing: just about every major step forward in our transportation history – as the presentation that afternoon had clearly shown – was an intervention by government, due less to private enterprise than to public funding. The roads, the canals, the interstate highways, and – through tax subsidies and especially land grants – the rail system were all dependent upon government action and the use of tax dollars.
2
One hears a lot today about the right size of government and the right amount of taxation. Not only politicians but also private, ordinary citizens are often heard to say, “Reduce the size of government” and “Lower taxes.” This is for many a political dogma, a litany in the public worship.
And, I’m sorry, it is just wrong.
What matters and should matter to all of us is not how big or how small our government is; what matters is how good our government is, how well our government serves our long-term, mutual interest.
And what matters is not that we pay too much in taxes, but to what degree each of us and each group of us are doing our fair share to fund the quality of government we need and deserve. We should all demand good government – intelligent, efficient, effective, and long-term government – as well as the tax system most likely to provide it.
3
Let us recall: the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all. These values should be pursued, supported, and honored above all others. Actions that threaten or diminish them should be avoided or prohibited, vilified, or at least highly taxed. Public leaders praising these essential values should be supported; those whose decisions undermine them should be hounded out of their positions of influence.
These values must be kept foremost in our minds as we consider any proposed change in government. The size and forms of government as well as methods used to determine the size of each income-earner’s fair share of its funding should be decided not on some abstract or dogmatic principle about either the size of government or about the amount of taxes imposed on everyone; but about making government better and the tax system more just.
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