Political Philosophy - Why Governments Overspend

Many people wonder why governments tend to spend so much money. Almost everyone has realized that the governments spend lots of money on various projects. Governments engage in many expensive endeavors that have little use and/or have little effectiveness. For example, the United States government spends trillions of dollars every year.

Unfortunately, taxpayers have to foot the bill. Most private citizens who follow politics probably find themselves wanting to bang their heads against the wall at how stupidly and wastefully their government spends money.

It may not seem to make sense, but it actually does. Governments do not take on expensive projects despite how much the projects cost; governments take on the projects because the projects cost so much.

We can understand this more fully if we take note of the nature of spending money and the nature of humans.

Regarding the spending of money, while one person spends money another person receives money. The private citizens and taxpayers look at government spending as spending, but the people in power who the make decisions look at it as revenue. For example, if a government project costs taxpayers $5 billion, then that means the government and its business associates have received $5 billion.

Since bureaucrats, politicians, and their cronies all earn money by spending the taxpayers' money, human nature tells us that they will try to "spend" as much as possible. Expecting otherwise would be analogous to giving a person a credit card and telling that person that someone else would have to pay the bill, and then expecting the person not to charge up a huge bill. Obviously, the person would charge up a huge bill because someone else will have to pay it. And governments will similarly rack up as huge of a bill as they can because other people have to pay for it.

To make the most money for themselves and their cronies, politicians and bureaucrats take on expensive projects even when the projects have little use. For the same reason, politicians and bureaucrats try to get the government involved in futile but expensive endeavors, such as the war on drugs. By getting into these futile but expensive endeavors, they have a constant excuse to spend lots of money.

As another example, most people see the Iraq War and the current occupation of Iraq as a huge blunder. They think this even despite all the government's propaganda supporting the war and despite all the misinformation supporting the war. It makes sense that most of the taxpaying people see the war as a mistake because it will cost them trillions of dollars. But it also makes sense that the government and the involved special interest groups support the war because they will get trillions of dollars in revenue from it.

Governments want to spend money without actually fixing problems. Governments want the problems to continue so that the governments have an excuse to continue spending money.

As long as a government can spend other people's money, it will spend it as seemingly wastefully as it can. I see the only solution as stopping the government from spending money. Government spending corrupts society, and I think we can only reduce that corruption by reducing government spending. The governments obviously will not reduce it themselves, so the people have to do that. The taxpayers have to stop letting their governments spend their money.