The Role of the Budget Division

Abstract

M OST of the questions that enter into a decision to make a particular expenditure, whether a new car for the family or a building for the state, involve value questions. There are few problems for which there are single right answers clearly and simply revealed by technical analysis. The broader the jurisdiction-the larger the family-the more complicated the values involved. Democratic government is the broadest of all possible jurisdictions, involving and recognizing more different and various values. Every individual in the jurisdiction would like to have his values dominant: the cotton grower, the steel worker, the window washer, the medical doctor, the lawyer, the economist. Every functional unit concentrates its value judgments around its function: all spare money ought to go to health, or to conservation, or to labor, or to education. All sensible people should take our judgment of what is good policy, say the economists, the lawyers, the doctors, the budgeteers, the personnel people. It should be plain that all of these drives are unconsciously authoritarian-antidemocratic. It should be plain that everybody will be better satisfied when no one is fully satisfied -when the final judgment is a general judgment that defers to all judgments, yields to none-including the individual judgment of the final decision-maker. This general judg-