PARKINSON'S SECOND LAW

“Expenditures rise to meet income.” C. Northcote Parkinson’s Second Law is explained in his 1960 book but it has sadly been forgotten.

Lenin prophesied that the United States would spend itself to destruction. Are we almost there?
The answer to our present economic woes ( for conservatives) is how to get our government to live within its means. Edmund Burke said the “to provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of Government.”

It all began with the graduated income tax in 1909 when Rep. John Nance Garner of Texas succeeded in gaining acceptance for this principle. Yet as far back as 1862, Mr. J. R, McCulloch, an economist, said that tax graduation was not an evil to be paltered with. “ The minute you abandon,... the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or their property, you are at sea without rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit.”

As time went by, Parkinson writes, “success in the modern age is to be measured by one’s ability to give the minimum of effort to one’s career and extract the maximum of subsidy from the state.” Parkinson also says the first task of government should be to decide upon the proportion which it can safely take of the national income - safely meaning fair and not destructive. Instead, expenditures have continually risen to meet income. He continues, “ There can be no economy while the public revenue is made roughly equal to the sum of the departmental demands. Economy must begin with fixing the revenue as a proportion of the national income and informing each department of the total expenditure it must not exceed.”

Here we are spending too much and taxing with an unequal system. The words of Great Britain’s Gladstone bewailing the expenditure on public works should echo today. “Vacillation, uncertainty, costliness, extravagance, meanness and all the conflictive vices that could be enumerated, are united in our present system.”

No echo can be heard from either chamber of Congress. Parkinson needs to be quoted again: “Even were it probable, ... that increased expenditure would buy anything but administrative constipation, the fact remains that the precipice lies somewhere ahead..”

I allow Thomas Jefferson to have the final say: “I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared... to preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with public debt... We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. ...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and rink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements... If we can prevent the Government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.”