Brooke Masters of The Washington Post revealed that beginning Dec. 1 a one-plane commercial airline will get a substantial federal subsidy-more than half a million dollars a year-to fly mostly affluent business travelers to expense-account meetings at the posh Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Va. Taxpayers from Harlem and Watts and everywhere else will pay more than $150 per passenger to reduce the price wealthy travelers will pay to get to their playground. This is part of a national program costing $38.6 million this year. It is exquisitely titled Essential Air Service.
“Essential To whom? “It’s about jobs for the community,” says an official of the airline. The congressman in whose district the Homestead sits says, “I consider [the subsidy] essential to keeping the hotel open.” Oh? The wealthy travelers (few from Harlem or Watts) taking taxdeductible trips (another subsidy) to a tony watering spot (three golf courses, stocked trout stream, skeet range, spa) will stay home and sulk unless taxpayers foot part of their travel bill? Most guests make the final leg of their trip by rented cars or limousines. The hotel has 600 rooms. The plane has 19 seats. In peak season it will make two round trips a day; the rest of the year, just’ one. It will average just six passengers per trip (although the subsidy will be paid even if the plane is empty). The hotel depends on this?
The Essential Air Service program is just another entitlement. Congress says many small communities are entitled to air service even if market realities make it unprofitable for commercial carriers to provide it. This is foolishness; it also is routine. It is a tiny part of an enormous pattern of federal activity. The Post’s Brooke Masters deserves accolades for excavating this story from the budget’s fine print. But it, and thousands of other follies, are hardly hatched in secret. Thousands of such expenditures are supposed to be noticed by the direct beneficiaries but not by the likes of Masters. They are the means members of Congress use to purchase perpetual incumbency. That is why America’s spacious skies are dark with dollars flying hither and yon, doing thousands of things that are neither essential nor even defensible, while the deficit swells and political culture curdles.
Who is to blame? Jeffersonians, whose hero lived 80 miles from the Homestead, have long memories, short tempers and an answer: Alexander Hamilton. They say their old nemesis, the first Treasury Secretary, put the nation on the downward path 200 years ago next week. Certainly few milestones on the road to modern America were as important as the report Hamilton submitted to Congress Dec. 5, 1791.
The Report on Manufactures was a blueprint for an alternative to Jefferson’s agrarian America. Hamilton’s Report, making the case for tariffs, a central bank, public works and other government assistance to commercial development, was not just a statement of economic policy. It was an exercise in statecraft as soulcraft. He aimed at nothing less than a change in the American character. Like Jefferson, Hamilton took seriously the social ecology of virtue. He wanted a different society because he had a different idea of virtue, individual and national.
Jefferson said: Keep the factories, financiers and cities in Europe. Democracy depends on yeomen dispersed over vast spaces (hence the Louisiana Purchase). Although in the 1790s America’s largest city, New York, had a population of about 33,000 (a lot smaller than Enid, Okla., is today), Hamilton was the first political thinker for urban America. He saw in Jefferson’s vision not the romance of bucolic life but an indolent, oligarchic, caste society suffocating America’s promise. Hamilton’s great biographer, Forrest McDonald, says Hamilton saw money as “the leaven, the fermenting yeast, that would stimulate growth, change, prosperity, and national strength.”
America never really had a choice between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian futures. The forces-scientific, industrial, financial, organizational-that made the modern world were going to erupt. Nothing Jeffersonians could have done would have made the Atlantic a barrier to them. Furthermore, it is, on balance, good that they erupted. Modernity has meant a vast improvement in conditions for the mass of mankind. And when Hitler and Stalin got factories, it was good that we had some, too.
Still, there is a tragic dimension to Hamiltonianism, and to American history. Hamilton had a healthy distrust of human nature, but was not wary enough. He underestimated the difficulty-the impossibility, it seems–of keeping government limited and reasonable once it becomes a big player in the game of creating and allocating wealth. Hamilton had an austere, even noble vision of a people energized by the spirit of perpetual improvement. He did not foresee the degradation of political and economic life that would result when government became an arena for entrepreneurship, engulfed in a feeding frenzy of people bending public power to private purposes.
Today’s national legislature lards the budget with spending for parochial projects, and justifies this re-election ritual with solemn references to two values. One is a soft-hearted concern for “fairness.” The other is a supposedly hardheaded, Hamiltonian concern for economic strength. The assumption about “fairness” is that everyone is entitled to partiality from the federal government in the allocation of special benefits. The economic assumption is that the maelstrom of political grasping that results from this entitlement mentality is conducive to national vigor.
Jeffersonians may have been dreamers but their nightmare is today’s normality–government as prize and prizegiver, politics as an endless auction. Can a practice so open and so common for so long be considered corrupt? We are back to the puzzle: Can something be a scandal if it does not scandalize? Or is that-the flaccid acceptance of things the scandal?
