Language Against Liberty: “Public Money”

As Thatcher exclaimed, there is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.

Fighting for a Free Future is pleased to introduce a new series for Voices for a Free Future: Language Against Liberty. In her monthly column, Fighting for a Free Future Volunteer Associate Jenifer Holly will be exposing the ideology hidden behind terms we use every day and how harmful they are to the fight for freedom.

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At the 1983 Conservative conference, Thatcher exclaimed that “there is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money”. This rhetorical quip, beyond succinctly expressing the indignation of many at the kleptomaniac state, points to a chronically overlooked asset of the left. The acceptance of the concept of “public money” has normalised the draining of each member of the public’s money, which they deserve to govern themselves.

Thatcher’s juxtaposition is so effective because it re-introduces the agency lost in such a vacuous term as “public money”. “Taxpayers’ money” leaves no ambiguity towards who owns that money – and ownership signals a right. Even “the public’s money” retains a sense of ownership that one can argue for – but any private right to this money completely disappears in the attributive “public money”. The term implies that such an immutable category exists, just as you would be hard-pressed to argue that a “wine glass” doesn’t hold a specific, unchangeable form. What is so insidious about “public money”, however, is that it is truly undefinable – it exists as a blob floating in policy discourse, immune to concerns about how it is shaped. Nobody is invited to ask for the specifics of its allocation - especially if they have been stripped of its ownership.

“Public money” could mean money belonging to the public, or money held by the state on behalf of the public, but its contemporary usage comes closest to money controlled by the state, with hardly a whiff of respect to those members of the public who raised it. But it was not always this way. The term finds its roots in Pitt’s Consolidated Fund of 1787, which brought together multiple revenue streams that each held a defined purpose; but this shift did not automatically allow “public money” to stoop to purposeless fungibility. In an 1828 Commons debate on the “Misappropriation of Public Money”, it was made clear that those entrusted with it had great responsibility as trustees for the public, and that expenditure without parliamentary authorisation violated the privileges of the Commons. Money that was the public’s was not the government’s to play with.

And of course, as Hayek would well make us know, the idea that “public money” is akin to a piggy bank – essentially like a pot of money ready to be drawn from, and allocated towards a holiday, in household terms – obscures the myriads of interactions that determine the proper allocation of scarce resources. We are not talking about a stash of cash in a bank ready for a rainy day – we are talking about construction, health, land, electricity, bureaucracy – erroneously collapsed into one blobby behemoth.

So, this term, that could easily be mistaken for innocent, implies much that should, instead, be vehemently contested. “Public” implies “ours”, which collectivises something that is taken through compulsion; those who bear the cost of tax or excessive borrowing (as, of course, not all public money is strictly taxpayers’ money) are stripped of their agency, with individual opportunity cost erased; and this money becomes a faux-necessity with a moral colour, shunning the question of whether or not it actually benefits the public.

The term manufactures an obligation that is too often employed to snatch more money away from its rightful owners. If we want to contest this, we must recognise, as Thatcher did, what is hidden in the vocabulary.

Jennifer Holly is a student at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. She is a Fighting for a Free Future Volunteer Associate and is committed to the fight for free markets and civil liberties. She can be followed on X through @jenniferaholly.