Every government benefit has a recipient, but it also has a payer. Politics tends to encourage us to focus on the first and forget the second.
Many hardships are visible, immediate, and emotionally compelling. They provide a rationale for Congress to pass a law, for an agency to distribute money, and for elected officials to congratulate themselves on their compassion. But almost no one asks the question that the pioneering American sociologist and political economist William Graham Sumner believed mattered most: Who provided the assistance and at what cost?
Sumner described much of the political process through a simple formula. A sees that X is suffering. A discusses the problem with B. A and B then propose a law requiring C to do something for X. A and B receive the satisfaction of having acted compassionately, X receives the benefit, and C receives the bill. C is what Sumner called the Forgotten Man.
Sumner developed this idea in a lecture entitled The Forgotten Man delivered in 1883, yet the logic still holds today. His argument was not merely that government programs are expensive. It is that political attention is distributed unequally. The person who requires assistance is visible, while the person whose labor, earnings, and savings make the assistance possible is obscured into abstractions such as “society” or “the public.”
But society does not write checks; individuals do. Every dollar governments spend must first be taxed from current production, borrowed against future production, or created in a way that reduces the purchasing power of existing money. Behind every public expenditure stands a worker, employer, investor, consumer, or future taxpayer. Sumner called this person the Forgotten Man, though he admitted that “the Forgotten Man is not seldom a woman.”
Sumner described the Forgotten Man as the “simple, honest laborer.” They tend to be independent and reliable. They also tend to be politically underrepresented, rarely organizing protests, hiring lobbyists, or asking for government assistance. But because they create no public crisis, they attract no public attention. “He works, he votes, generally he prays,” Sumner wrote, “but he always pays—yes, above all, he pays.”
The Forgotten Man can be a mechanic, parent, or small-business owner. What defines the Forgotten Man is not their income or occupation. It is their position in the political and economic equation. They bear the costs of policies they do not design and do not benefit from directly. The central irony of modern politics is that the citizens who cause the fewest problems are given the greatest burdens.
Sumner is adamant that there is no such thing as something for nothing. Everything we have is owed to the labor and sacrifice of earlier generations. Civilization survives because each generation maintains and enlarges what it has received. Yet history is also the record of repeated attempts to evade this fact, Sumner writes, “All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.”
The saying “there is no such thing as something for nothing” sounds obvious in day-to-day life, but in the political realm, this truism is highly inconvenient. Once a proposed benefit is described as a right, any discussion of its cost is viewed as harsh or cold. When a new policy is proposed, anyone who asks, “Who will pay?” is accused of caring more about money than people. Yet for Sumner, money is not the root of all evil; it represents hours worked, risks taken, goods produced, and consumption postponed. To take a person’s earnings is to take some portion of the time and effort used to earn them.
Sumner’s argument was not that people should never help one another. Families, charities, and communities have always supported people in need. Voluntary assistance can express genuine affection and solidarity because the giver chooses to bear the cost.
Political redistribution is different. A and B may sincerely want to help X, but their sincerity does not confer on them the right to command C. If they are willing to help X with their own resources, no law is required. The need for a law arises precisely because A and B want to direct resources of C that do not belong to them. Productive economic activity is the condition that makes every political project possible. Before wealth can be redistributed, someone must create it, and no society can remain generous after weakening its source.
The political attraction of spending others’ money is that its benefits are visible while its burdens can be hidden. A new program produces identifiable beneficiaries. The recipient receives a check, subsidized service, a tax credit, a protected job, or a guaranteed price. Politicians can point to the benefit and claim credit for their next election. The cost, however, is spread among millions of taxpayers, making organized resistance difficult.
Modern public-choice theory developed this mechanism more formally. Small groups with large individual stakes have stronger incentives to organize than large groups whose individual losses are comparatively small. The ordinary taxpayer has neither the time nor the incentive to investigate every government program (unless they work at the Cato Institute). Once benefits are established, recipients and associated institutions adapt their expectations and behavior around them, creating constituencies opposed to cutting spending.
This does not mean recipients are corrupt or that their needs are imaginary. The problem is structural. Politicians receive credit for creating and expanding benefits but rarely receive credit for preventing an expenditure whose costs would emerge decades later. A promise made today can help win an election tomorrow.
Political patronage in a modern democracy can take the respectable form of identifying groups as favored clients of the state. Politicians speak of “our seniors,” “our working families,” “our industries,” or “our communities,” and then compete to demonstrate devotion by directing public resources toward them. This language obscures the paternal relationship underneath it; politicians assume the role of benefactor even though the resources were supplied by the Forgotten Man.
Sumner’s argument is often described as a defense of selfishness. But compassion that only recognizes the beneficiary is only half the story. A social policy must consider those in need, but it must also consider those who pay. The tragedy is that modern political culture treats the Forgotten Man’s productivity as proof that they can bear yet another burden. Because they paid the last tax, they can pay the next. Responsibility becomes punitive, while political dependency becomes organized and rewarded.
Sumner wrote that the Forgotten Man is “the very life and substance of society.” They are not visible because they are usually too busy maintaining the world that reformers propose to reorganize. They receive flattering speeches before elections and larger invoices afterward. A government that remembers every claimant but forgets every contributor will eventually have nothing left to redistribute.
The first duty of political reform is not to invent another promise but to remember the people who make every political promise and program possible. The Forgotten Man is not forgotten by accident. They are forgotten because remembering them would force politicians to ask not only what the government can give but also what it has the right to take.
