Nice article in Forbes today by Reihan Salam about my hero, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, and the potential revival of Goldwaterism in the GOP. Salam highlights the tension between the “root canal” economics of Barry Goldwater (and now, apparently, Mark Sanford) and the supply-side orthodoxy born under Ronald Reagan and executed with relish by Bush the Younger.

While I’m all in favor of lower taxes, the fact is that the size of government is defined by how much it spends and how much it regulates, not how much it taxes. After all, sooner or later, spending must be paid for with taxes. Spending dictates taxes. Period.

Why is it a matter of conservative/libertarian dogma that paying for government with a credit card is preferable to paying for government with cash on hand? The former still requires cash at some point in the future . . . but with interest. Moreover, a regime that allows voters to get government services today but to bill someone else for those services tomorrow is a recipe for fiscal irresponsibility (yes, yes — I’m willing to accept that expenditures that help future generations as much as those at present — like WWII or certain kinds of infrastructure spending — are theoretically fine. But that rules out only a modest amount of the federal budget). Sure, it’s politically easier to cut taxes than to cut spending, and likewise easier to bill future generations for government services than to bill taxpayers at present, but no one said that fighting leviathan was going to be easy.

If we are going to judge politicians regarding their support for big government, we should put away the tax metric and use instead a spending metric. The long-standing belief that we can “starve the federal beast” with tax cuts has proven to be an illusion. There is no substitute for spending restraint. That is, unless we’re going to give up the ghost regarding the size and scope of government.