Written by John Turner   

Liane Ellison Norman of Pittsburgh wrote a letter to the New York Times in which she said that taxes are simply expenditures we make for things we want. Her implication was that if we started thinking of them that way we would have less disordered political discourse.

She’s right, as far as she goes. But she failed to point out that the things we buy through taxes are purchased collectively whereas the things we get with our checkbooks and credit cards are bought individually. When goods are acquired collectively a process has to be set up to decide what to buy. That process is susceptible to various manipulations.

In America right now some people have a lot more say in what we buy collectively than others do. That will always be true of any political system but in the United States the magnitude of difference between the influence of the average citizen and that of major political players has become astronomical.

That difference has to be reduced if we’re going to have a genuine democratic government, which, of course, we don’t have now. We fail to have it first of all because an insufficient percentage of the people pay attention to how the government behaves and how it decides to spend its money. You can’t have a democracy when a majority of the people don’t bother to find out what’s going on. That the American people are lazy-minded is attested by virtually every investigation which looks into what people know. If we can’t get the citizens to pay attention then we can’t have democratic government nor are we likely to have a system which cares much about just expenditures. So the paramount task of political reformation is to awaken more of the people and help them develop the knowledge required for sensible collective decisions.

Why the American people are as lazy-minded as they are is one of the great mysteries of the modern world. Like most gigantic puzzles it doesn’t have a single explanation, but rather a web of weird and hidden influences which have become intertwined in ways that are very hard to sort out. You could say it’s just human nature but I don’t think that’s right. Although Americans do have human problems, the major American problem right now is distinctive to the country itself.

People who are laboring from insufficient knowledge are particularly subject to manias. The populace becomes obsessed with, or fearful of, something which may, in itself, have no, or only slight, significance. Then the collective effort, and expenditures with it, begins to flow towards doing something about the fearful problem. It becomes so fixed in the public mind that few can step back and ask whether it is, indeed, the problem it is said to be.

The men who flew airplanes into buildings in September 2001 posed a certain kind of problem which did call for response. But when they were transformed from what they were into a gigantic, unfathomable force named “Terrorism,” then the mania took hold and the money began to flow. I guess you could say it was a collective decision to go and drop bombs on Afghanistan for ten years running, but it was a collective decision of an extremely murky sort that had almost no public knowledge involved in it. Bombs -- at least the sort the United States purchases -- cost a lot of money; the mechanisms used to drop them in various places cost a lot of money; the people who operate the mechanisms cost a lot of money; the procedure of moving them all around the world and maintaining them in difficult areas costs immense piles of money. And so on; it’s not hard to get the point.

This money is spent to service a mania, a mania that was allowed to be manufactured -- and it was deliberately manufactured -- by the ignorance of the people.

The pot of money we can title “Afghanistan” is not the only pot reserved for feeding a mania. Remember “Iraq;” it’s a pot that doesn’t get into the news much lately. But it’s still bubbling. Or, if you want to go father back you can recall “Communism.”

Until we can free ourselves from public ignorance and the manias which arise from it, we can’t spend our money in the way Ms. Norman is suggesting. Furthermore, there will never be enough money. You can pave a road adequately, you can clean up a water system, but you can’t spend a mania away. A mania is a bottomless money pit.

So, that’s where the money goes, into placating ignorance through manias. If you want it to go somewhere else then you had best start working against the influences that cause us to throw it away.