Tax Lawyer's Blog

While others have been waxing mournful about the passing of Senator Robert Byrd a chap named S.M. Oliva of the Mises Economics Blog had this mean-spirited observation about the self-proclaimed King of Pork (emphasis mine):

Robert Byrd, the president pro tempore of the Senate (and former Ku Klux Klan chapter leader), finally managed to die this morning at the age of 92. Byrd, arguably the greatest advocate of government spending in Washington, served in the Senate for 51 years.

To put that in perspective, the total federal spending during Byrd’s tenure was just over $77.2 trillion — and no, I didn’t adjust that number for inflation. Anyway you calculate it, that’s a lot of wealth destroyed.

I will address the nastiness later, but first let’s deal with the merits of Mr. Oliva’s little drive-by.

If we accept Oliva’s data, during the time Senator Byrd was a sitting Senator the federal government spent an average of about $1.5 trillion per year ($77.2 trillion/51). Like all aggregate statistics this tells us nothing. We have no way of knowing how big a number $77 trillion over a fifty one year period really is because Silva gives us no basis for comparison.

In other words, for us to make an informed judgment about whether Byrd’s Congresses were spendthrifts or tightwads we’d have to know the level of spending of other Congresses, of which Byrd was not a member, during a period of identical duration.

If that isn’t enough, Oliva then makes two extremely lazy and absurd inferences in his hit piece on a dead guy:

1. That Byrd himself was responsible for all of the spending the federal government did during his fifty one year Senate career; and
2. That all of the federal spending done during Byrd’s tenure was wasteful and, therefore, a destruction of wealth.

I haven’t done the research yet, but I think it’s safe to assume that Senator Byrd voted against at least some spending bills that eventually became law. Consequently, for Mr. Oliva to simply tally all of the spending the federal government did during Byrd’s half a century Senate career and use it to imply that the Senator was personally responsible for that spending is silly, irresponsible and unfair.

But Oliva isn’t done yet. He then vaults to the stunning conclusion that all of the $77 trillion the federal government spent from 1958 through 2010 represents “wealth destroyed.” Apparently, Oliva thinks that the expenditures the U.S. made for national defense, intelligence gathering and border control during Byrd’s term (half of which was during the Cold War) were utterly wasteful.

All of this would be mere shoddy reasoning were it done by a first year economics student, but it’s an utter embarrassment when done by a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advancment of Capitalism.

Now let’s address the nastiness.

I have never been a fan of Byrd. He is probably the biggest purveyor of pork in Senate history. But when Mr. Oliva says the Senator “finally managed to die” he crosses the Rubicon of decency and should be chastised for it.

Oliva is obviously happy that the Senator died and is no longer spending the taxpayers’ money. His only lament seems to be that Byrd didn’t die sooner. Oliva is, in essence, dancing on a man’s grave - a man whom he did not know and had never met.

It angered me when hate-mongers on the left called for the death of Clarence Thomas and the assassination of George W. Bush merely because they disliked their politics.¹ What Oliva has done here is no different.

People don’t deserve to die simply because they see the world differently from the way you see it. Anyone this sure of his views is a blinking idiot and a danger to the republic.

Enough already.

Footnotes:

¹  See also Dick Cheney, Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan.

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