This post was initially written in French https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/87308
Who has never heard this phrase? It comes back almost automatically as soon as a collective risk becomes visible. After a flood, after a wildfire, after a storm, after a drought that lasts too long, you hear, in passing conversation or in an op ed, a formula that sounds like both an obvious truth and a conclusion. That familiar The Government Will Foot the Bill, which I have kept as the title of this post. Sometimes it appears in a gentler form, The government must take responsibility. Sometimes in a harsher after the fact form, They have to pay. In every case, the phrase says something about our relationship to the collective, to solidarity, to justice, and to public money. It also says something about the way we turn a disaster into a political problem.
I wanted to write a post that starts from this formula, not to decide whether the claim is true or false, but to understand what it means, what it hides, and what it forces us to make explicit. The expression has a particular power. It seems simple, but it compresses very different ideas, sometimes contradictory. It can express an expectation of protection. It can express anger. It can express a demand for justice. It can express a vague belief in an unlimited common pot (that famous magic money, as we call it in French) to reuse the well known phrase. It can also express a feeling of individual powerlessness. And depending on the country, the history of institutions, and lived experience of risk, the word government does not evoke the same thing. Still, it is worth noting that this debate about who pays often starts too late, because trying to clarify the government will foot the bill is already turning the phrase into a programme, fiscal and moral.