John Stuart Mill wrote that “... security of person and property, and equal justice between individuals, are the first needs of society, and the primary ends of government.” The extent to which modern governments have over-reached their intended roles is exemplified by the Canadian government’s decision to “match” Canadians’ donations to Pakistani flood relief dollar-for -dollar.

First of all, how is it that the feds have wads of money on hand to spend on such ad-hoc situations? Is this money to be diverted from some other area under the government’s purview? If so, the implication is that the program from which the money is taken is just not that important. If not, it was simply money burning a hole in the government’s pocket. In either case, it is money the government should not have in the first place! So, if the Canadian Taxpayer decides to donate $1 million to Pakistani relief, the Canadian government is saying “Let’s make your donation $2 million – after all, we’ve got a bunch of your money for no other reason than we can take it from you. We don’t really need it for anything, but no one will complain about us spending it on such a good cause! (And next year we’ll be back for more...)” Moreover, are the government’s motives truly altruistic?

To paraphrase Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy will endure until the day the political class discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. It is sad to see that in Canada our government can so blatantly indicate that once their vote-delivering programs are covered (even if through large increases in the national debt), there is still enough in the kitty to allow discretionary spending in areas where government has no place.

The impulse to help people who are in dire straits far away, and who we don’t know and probably will never meet, exemplifies the best of humanity’s values and is truly as ennobling a gesture as any individual can make. For a government to usurp the exercise of this sentiment by spending money coerced from individuals is disgusting. Such decisions, not to mention the money that allows them to be made, should be left to the individuals that earn that money in the first place.

The impulse to send relief to disaster-stricken regions like recently-flooded Pakistan shows compassion and altruism to be the most inspiring of human values, but these are values best expressed by individuals personally moved to contribute. 

Discretionary spending is not something a government should be trusted with. Our masters all too often forget that any money they have at hand is not theirs; it belongs to the people. The fact that Parliament has decided that it can match individual Canadians’ donations means that it has money at hand that it has no need for in the first place. Like in the apocryphal bureaucracy, the rule of thumb seems to be that money must be spent in order to justify its having been appropriated in the first place.