Maybe we need a -phobia word for the fear of public spending. The -phobia suffix is great because, in its application to social and political issues, it expresses the relationship between fear and hatred.
What I mean is, if you take claustrophobia — the fear of small, enclosed spaces — that’s simply a fear. But if you take homophobia, you can’t simply explain that as the fear of gay people. When your phobia is in relation to a group of people, it’s not just fear, it’s more socially oriented than that. It’s contempt, disgust, hatred.
The word “misogyny” expresses this from the other side, with the Greek root misos meaning “hatred”. Misogyny denotes the hatred of women, but then again to describe it simply as hatred would be insufficient. Most often, misogyny does not manifest simply as hatred, as when someone cuts you off in traffic. It’s like homophobia. There is also a fear underlying it. A contempt. A mysterious conviction that a group of people are utterly different and separate. A base assumption that they are objects, and therefore a fear of their free will. An ability to show sincere kindness, poisoned by condescension.
What does this have to do with public spending? This was put best by a Twitter user who has been lost to the sands of my memory: Just ask yourself, for example, if libraries didn’t already exist, whether any contemporary Western government would dream of creating them. It’s a rhetorical question: of course they wouldn’t. The only kind of “public spending” I’ve seen governments celebrate lately is when they give some kind of rebate in order to curry favour with voters. In other words, they will celebrate putting money directly in citizens’ pockets — but not investing money in public institutions. Public institutions are not so much invested in as grudgingly given their due, and then only if voters demand it loudly enough and/or the institution is “profitable” (an irrelevant concept, since public instutitions are not businesses).
There is a phobia here. A misos. Sometimes public institutions are celebrated, but often for the wrong reasons, e.g. efficiency or profitability. This may sound sensible on the surface, but only consider what public instutions can be: beacons of knowledge, spaces for community organizing, the pride of cities, an expression of values. To instead celebrate their efficiency or profitability is essentially to celebrate their not taking up too much space or speaking up — much the same things as women are too-often celebrated for. The underlying assumption is that public institutions are only there to serve a function and in fact must not express values. And once you define their purpose as purely utilitarian, it’s natural to think they are lucky to exist at all, given that we could just privatize and outsource their functions, right? So, get back in the kitchen, basically.
I would hazard a guess that those of us who are passionate about the idea that all genders have equal rights and potential, are much the same set as those of us who believe public spending can be worth celebrating, and that we should do more of it in places like libraries, science centres, public transportation, community medicine, and more. I’m not sure what that correlation means exactly. At the end of the day, I just want to live in a society that roughly matches my values.