Public Money, Private Glory, and the Peril of Political Justice

I am told that the government has spent millions on advertisements promoting a president, and that these payments continue even after he has announced a distinct political enterprise of his own. In the same season, federal agents, armed with a judicial warrant and under the authority of the Department of Justice, have raided the home of a sitting legislator, reportedly in an inquiry concerning immigration paperwork. The two stories appear, at first sight, to belong to different worlds: one of flattering images and purchased applause, the other of stern officials and seized documents. Yet they are in truth but two faces of the same power, and must be judged by the same principles of justice and economy.

When I wrote of the duties of the sovereign in *The Wealth of Nations*, I confined them to defence, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works and institutions which, though useful to society, could never repay a private undertaker. I did not reckon among these duties the celebration of the sovereign’s own virtues at the public charge. Taxation, I there argued, ought to observe four plain maxims: equality, certainty, convenience, and economy. To require the mechanic, the nurse, and the porter to contribute, in the price of every taxed article, to advertisements whose principal effect is to exalt a single magistrate or faction, is to offend against equality; to dribble those sums through obscure budgets and agencies is to offend against certainty; to squander them on vanity is to offend against economy.

We must trace such expenditures, not by their fine language, but by their incidence. The visible beneficiary is concentrated: a particular office-holder, his courtiers, perhaps a political brand newly announced. The sufferers are diffuse and silent: taxpayers who never agreed to subscribe to this species of forced panegyric. Men act, as I long ago observed, from a regard to their own interest; when those who command the public purse can purchase reputation with other people’s money, the temptation is obvious, the virtue required to resist it is uncommon, and any system that leans upon uncommon virtue is a system framed to fail. In my day I warned that merchants petitioning for regulation commonly contrive a monopoly against the public; you have now added a modern refinement, whereby rulers purchase a kind of monopoly of attention, and do so under the same pretext of serving the nation.

Let us, however, summon the impartial spectator, of whom I discoursed in *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*. What would such a well‑informed and disinterested observer feel, learning that his compulsory contributions sustained advertisements praising a particular ruler, even after that ruler had openly embarked upon a partisan enterprise? He might endure, with some patience, plain notices that inform citizens of their rights or of public dangers; these respect them as reasonable beings. But to be compelled to pay for his own political instruction in the virtue of the prince, to have his necessities taxed that another man’s ambition may be amplified, is of another nature. He would feel resentment, not because praise is given, but because it is purchased with his money, for ends to which his conscience may be totally opposed.

The search of a legislator’s home presents a different question. Here the Department of Justice declares that agents executed a judicially authorised warrant, as part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation, reportedly connected with immigration documents. Now, in the second duty of the sovereign—the exact administration of justice—the magistrate is not only permitted but obliged to inquire into suspected violations of the law, even when the suspect is powerful, respected, or popular. If the laws against fraud in obtaining the privileges of citizenship are to be more than a scarecrow for the weak, they must bind the strong also. A house search, when grounded upon lawful authority and probable cause, is therefore not in itself a mark of tyranny, but rather a necessary instrument, provided it be employed under rules general, public, and strictly observed.

Yet though the form may be regular, the danger of abuse remains real. When prosecutions touch prominent figures, when the news of a raid becomes matter for factional triumph on one side and cries of persecution on the other, justice is drawn toward the noisy theatre of party. Here again my old suspicion of “conspiracies against the public” should not be reserved for merchants alone. Politicians, prosecutors, and partisans may form, without any formal agreement, an alliance of interest in which legal discretion becomes a weapon of reputation, and reputation, in turn, a resource for future power. The impartial spectator, observing that the same government which buys praise for one ruler now seizes the papers of a critic or rival, will naturally demand more than assurances; he will ask for clear rules, consistent application, and a visible separation between those who benefit from power and those who exercise its coercive instruments.

What, then, should we say? Spending public money on advertisements that exalt a particular ruler, especially once he has declared an organised political venture, is an abuse both of the revenue and of the people’s trust. It is not a necessary function of the state but a luxury of its masters, purchased at the expense of the labouring poor. A judicial search in a criminal investigation, by contrast, lies within the proper sphere of government; but in times of heated faction it must be conducted with double circumspection, so that justice does not merely exist in the statutes, but is seen, by the common eye, to be even‑handed in its blows and indifferent to party. If the same hand that spends our money to sing its own praises also wields the law as a rod for its enemies, the constitution is in danger of becoming a great chess‑board on which living men and women are pushed about for the amusement of their rulers.