The Thinking ‘Kat: The Role of Government

Of late, I have been having a lengthy exchange with Tom, of Citizen Tom, on matters pertaining to taxes, the morality of taxes, the role of government. Tom has some peculiar beliefs about what is and is not a justifiable, and even moral use of taxpayer money. He also appears quite wedded to a system of greed, which I will come to in a moment.

His post regarding our mutual comments elsewhere doesn’t really address the thrust of our conversation, with preferences for misdirection about the poor, embattled Trump, and the allegedly socialist Democrats. Note that he also does not address the contents of one of my prior posts, preferring to offer philosophical remarks that offer nothing of actual substance. He also betrays his own abuse of numbers.

What is the Role of Government?

Tom is American, and a deeply conservative one at that. He sees everything through the lens of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There appears to be little room for deviation from this. He believes the role of government should be minimal, and subscribes to the notion that it should only really be involved in what he regards as the security of the country. He does not believe there should much government involvement in education, healthcare, or social care. He objects to the use of taxpayer money contributing in these areas. He has no objection to his tax dollars paying for military services, or border control.

Section 8 of the Constitution declares: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

Emphasis mine. See that? General Welfare. Welfare is defined by the dictionary in two ways. Firstly, ‘the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group’. Secondly, a ‘statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need’.

What might be considered a basic material need? One World Beyond Borders defines the four basic needs as food, shelter, clothing and healthcare.

What about those four needs strikes anyone as unreasonable? I am curious to know if anyone feels that providing of those needs is somehow morally dubious, or a poor use of tax dollars?

It certainly seems that Tom believes these are morally dubious activities for a government to be involved in. It is easier for him to decry anything that he feels remotely suggests the lurking bogeyman of socialism, than to develop ideas and solutions to help the 11% of Americans living below the poverty line. It is more morally right for the much-hyped, often over-stated matter of immigration to receive taxpayer dollars. ICE will shortly be in receipt of $45 billion, and total funding for immigration enforcement will reach $150 billion. The cost of erasing homelessness? $20 billion, less than half what ICE will receive. In fact (and this is rather ironic, in light of DOGE), ICE will soon grow beyond several other federal departments combined. To quote directly from the link:

According to AIC Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, each year, ICE will now be flushed with more cash than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, with the bill’s passage, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, ICE will become the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

This seems to be morally acceptable to Tom, and he has no problem with vast sums of taxpayer money funding this. I wonder if he considers morally acceptable that much of the funds for this, and the funds affording tax breaks for corporations and the affluent, are coming from social and medical care for those who are already impoverished?

After all, the role of the government is to ensure the welfare of its people, and the only thing that affects the welfare of the American people is illegal immigrants right… right?!

The Morality of Spending Other People’s Money

Tom’s objection to helping people fountains out from the belief that governments are inherently bad, and cannot be entrusted with anything other than the most limited of responsibilities. A lot of this is down to theological beliefs; Tom misguidedly believes the USA to be a Christian nation, a belief that stands at odds with why so many fled to the Americas in the first place, as well as ignorance of the USA’s founding principles. As I explained to him, the USA was founded by immigrants, and built by immigrants. Over the years, millions of people from all over the world have found homes in the USA. The US has always been a melting pot of cultures and beliefs, with all being welcome. Tom is happy to see tax dollars pay for anti-immigration measures, to preserve ‘cultural identity’, but he forgets that the USA has never been as homogenous as he thinks it is.

Tom also objects to secular schooling. For this reason, he does not want taxes funding education. His belief that public healthcare is wrong is based on the idea that people should fend for themselves. He does not want people to suckle on the government teat, as it were. Of course, previously he has had no answer to wage inequality, and a general culture that values the hording of wealth. Does Tom advocate for businesses to pay a living wage? Of course not, because that is unfair to the corporations and their profit margins! It is most unkind to suggest that the billionaires pay their employees better, why offer better wages, why chip into the huge profits, when all people need to do is work even harder to magically improve their circumstances?

Tom would entrust education, healthcare, and who-knows-what-else to private interests. He believes that with appropriate government oversight, private businesses can better serve the public. What he does not understand is that private businesses are more concerned with the bottom line. They operate to satisfy shareholders. They can and do cut corners to achieve higher profit margins. They will not pay better wages without being cajoled into doing so. In Britain, we suffer the cost of privatised water and energy, and we are expected to shoulder the burden of bailing out failing companies, and creaking infrastructure.

So, private control over key public services tends to raise the costs to the public, whilst delivering no noticeable improvements! In fact, services have often gotten worse here in the UK. With this in mind, it is morally reasonable to place vital services into private hands, or is it in fact better to place these services under public control, to actually serve the public interest?

Obviously this is not a perfect solution. Governments can be lousy. They be corrupt. They can influenced by wealthy backers (just look at Trump and his relationships with Musk and Bezos). However, there are also plenty of demonstrations that they can handle certain sectors a lot better, and that it is morally, financially and socially better to have the likes of education, healthcare etc in public hands. You need only look at the Nordic countries. Denmark consistently ranks as the happiest country on earth. Yes, they pay more in taxes, but they also have less than one percent of their population living under the poverty line. No one goes bankrupt from medical bills. The quality of their healthcare system is superior to the USA’s. The Danish education system is consistently ranked as one of the best in the world.

It seems the ‘objection’ to publicly funding key services comes not from a meaningful place, but rather, simply down to ideology. That, and fear of the government bogeyman. Instead, Tom appears to be wedded to the idea of greed being best. He does not have a problem with people hording wealth whilst others struggle to put food on the table, and that is a shocking attitude for a supposedly pious follower of Christ.

Update 11/7/25:

As is his want, the cowardly Derrick Thiessen recently provided some ‘commentary‘ on my posts about the role of government. Leaving aside his awful views on genital mutilation (which Bruce Gerencser has already dismantled), what does this fool have to say about my posts?

Well, ultimately the answer is nothing. Derrick Thiessen has nothing to say. He does not address the content of my posts, he does not link to them, and as ever, he lacks the strength of his convictions to even use my name. Cowards will do what cowards will do, and in this instance, yet again, Derrick Thiessen lies through omission. To offer one quote from his post:

#2. The Role of Government

The title of this section comes from MM’s website (my initials aren’t even MM, so the idiot can’t even get that right!) and we are not interested in his convoluted and wrong logic about government. What people are confused about is the actual role the government plays in life. Most suggestions are made from personal subjective interpretation and opinion, not facts.

His entire opening statement is wrong. He obviously did not read my posts. There is nothing subjective about the fact that it would cost $20 billion to erase homelessness in the USA, and that the money is clearly there. There is nothing subjective about the success of the Nordic nations where it comes to healthcare and education performance, and these countries score highly with regards to poverty indexes too. These are facts, and arguments borne from those facts are far more logical than Thiessen’s ‘obey God or be bad’ reasoning. Notice that he does not dare tackle specifics of my arguments. This is because he can’t. He lacks the critical reasoning skills to do so.

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