DADDY PARTY, MOMMY PARTY. It's ye olde meme for respectively the Pachs and the Donks (hie thee here or here) but George Lakoff reframes it slightly as "a strict father family and a nurturant parent family." Lakoff's stated objective is to change the nature of political conversation, such that the term "tax relief" loses its force. (I seem to remember President Clinton, early in his term, attempting to substitute "investment" for spending and "contributions" for taxes, but I digress.)

Lakoff makes some other points that contain more substance (I suppose to a linguist, everything looks like a frame. To an economist, everything looks like an opportunity cost. If you want to see the opportunity cost argument posed in a drastic way, hie thee hence and register thyself.)

Methinks Professor Lakoff is being a bit disingenuous to complain about "conservatives and progressives" talking past each other. (I could grouse about the framing bias inherent in equating expansions of the role of the national government with progress, but that's a digression. Today's sermon is about the role of government.) Consider the following:

"Conservatives have worked for decades and spent billions on their think tanks to establish their frames, create the right language, and get the language and the frames they evoke accepted. It has taken them awhile to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an affliction and an unfair punishment -- all of which require 'relief.' They have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.

"Taxes look very different when framed from a progressive point of view. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, taxes are the price of civilization. They are what you pay to live in America -- your dues -- to have democracy, opportunity and access to all the infrastructure that previous taxpayers have built up and made available to you: highways, the Internet, weather reports, parks, the stock market, scientific research, Social Security, rural electrification, communications satellites, and on and on. If you belong to America, you pay a membership fee and you get all that infrastructure plus government services: flood control, air-traffic control, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and so on.

Interestingly, the wealthy benefit disproportionately from the American infrastructure. The Securities and Exchange Commission creates honest stock markets. Most of the judicial system is used for corporate law. Drugs developed with National Institutes of Health funding can be patented for private profit. Chemical companies hire scientists trained under National Science Foundation grants. Airlines hire pilots trained by the Air Force. The beef industry grazes its cattle cheaply on public lands. The more wealth you accumulate using what the dues payers have provided, the greater the debt you owe to those who have made your wealth possible. That is the logic of progressive taxation.."

Professor Lakoff takes it for granted that roads, communication hookups, weather forecasts, parks, orderly markets (certainly he is aware that the stock exchanges are not government enterprises,) pensions, and research are properly the function of government. Many of those things are provided by government, but there is nothing in the Welfare Economics Paradigm that requires they be, and there is certainly room for debate on whether the roads, communication networks, parks, pensions, and research ought to be privatized. And Lakoff has bundled the cultural conservatives, whose positions on abortion, public assistance, firearm ownership, and the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq often reflect goals other than economic goals, with the libertarian conservatives (that in itself might be a mixed metaphor, but bear with me) who see some of the services named immediately above as services that could be more efficiently provided by private actors, and who might look at some of the services Professor Lakoff mentions in the third paragraph I quote as corporate welfare. From that perspective, co-mingling all tax funds to provide services that funnel benefits to a few make little sense. (Professor Lakoff's parable of the club with differing levels of benefit to different members reflects a tension within the it-takes-a-village point of view. An old (and cheap) book titled The Screwing of the Average Man (details or see how cheap) devotes some pages to a phenomenon called "transfer screwing" in which politicos will threaten to take away some small benefit to many in order to protect a large benefit to a few. Although the thrust of the book is left-populist, there is much in there to intrigue a libertarian. (Nested parentheses, what is this, a proof? No, the proof is in my portfolio.))

Professor Lakoff is incomplete in his pairing of the complaints of "tax relief" adherents with the accomplishments of the state. He neglects the potential for corruption of the regulators (naw, wouldn't happen, we've all read our Herbert Croly (reissue) and we serve the people.) He also neglects controversial and potentially productivity-sapping regulation of the kind that keeps Walter Olson busy. It is likely that advocates of the various roles for government will continue to talk past each other if one side keeps saying "Corporate Welfare. OSHA. Amtrak." while the other keeps saying "Legal Infrastructure. Accessible Schools. Safe Prescription Drugs."

The conversation over the scope and nature of government matters. Crooked Timber finds an Andrew Tobias column that lays it out:

"Seven programs make up 75 percent of all federal spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, civil service pensions, defense and interest on the debt."

Mr Tobias's point: the Bush Administration expects to spend $1.8 trillion per year on these things, and expects to take in $1.35 trillion per year in taxes -- whether or not these are static or dynamic score forecasts he does not tell us -- which implies that interest payments will increase. The first five items are items where some kind of privatization might work (personal retirement accounts, medical savings accounts) or some tough love might be in order (Medicaid and civil service pensions) and they are also items that are subject to all manner of fiddles (taxing Social Security benefits, changing the retirement age, second-guessing doctors.)

I still have not made up my mind whether the greatest looming saecular crisis is international (Islam versus Christianity) or domestic (the nature of Western culture and the role of the state within it) but these promise to be interesting times ahead.