Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Keys Moran

The line is a neat little trap: it adopts the respectable uniform of “fiscal conservative” and then quietly detonates one of the label’s laziest assumptions. “Government should pay for itself” sounds like thrift, but the phrasing smuggles in a businesslike premise that many anti-government arguments conveniently ignore: government is already a revenue engine. Taxes, fees, and the basic conditions that make an economy function (property rights, courts, infrastructure, stability) are not charity; they’re the operating model.

Moran’s intent reads less like a balanced-budget sermon and more like a demand for honesty about inputs and outputs. If you truly believe in paying for what you use, then you can’t treat taxation as theft while treating roads, police, contract enforcement, and public health as free background services. The subtext needles a familiar political performance: deficit hysteria when it blocks social spending, deficit amnesia when it enables tax cuts or favored programs. “Pay for itself” also flips the moral frame. Instead of asking whether government is “too big,” it asks whether we’re collecting and pricing the benefits we already expect it to deliver.

Coming from a science-fiction writer, the aphorism carries genre-adjacent skepticism about slogans. SF tends to interrogate systems, not vibes; Moran’s sentence treats ideology as a UI skin over an accounting reality. It’s a one-liner that forces the listener to pick a lane: either admit you want less government outright, or accept that a functioning state requires a funding mechanism commensurate with its promises.