The other day Gov. Tim Kaine announced a number of state and federal grants. Among other things, Charles City County will receive $800,000 in Community Development Block Grant money, and another $600,000 in state funds, to rehab or replace 19 houses and provide indoor wastewater to another 25.

Another pot of government money will help build a health clinic on Tangier Island. West Point, Va., will get $2.6 million in state and federal money to build a visitors' center, install sidewalks, put in a water line and fire hydrants, and rehab 22 homes.

Those are all fine projects. It's nice that some of those in Charles City who have been without plumbing amenities will soon have them. And the clinic on Tangier Island will no doubt be of much service.

On the other hand, residents in other parts of the country -- Mobile, Ala., say, or McMinnville, Ore. -- don't bear any blame for the inadequate state of the current medical facilities on Tangier, or the lack of sidewalks and hydrants in West Point. So it's not clear why they're being asked to help foot the bill for those projects. They might argue, not without reason, that everything in life entails trade-offs -- and the many delights of rural living also carry concomitant costs. By contrast, New York City is filled with sidewalks and fire hydrants -- but good luck spending a quiet afternoon fishing in midtown Manhattan. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Why -- for that matter -- did Virginians (and Texans, New Yorkers, and Floridians) have to contribute to a federal program, Mobile Works, that shelled out $2.8 million last year to provide tuition and job training for roughly 300 Alabamans? What about the nearly $38,000 in federal GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) grants that went to recent McMinnville High graduates in Oregon?

THIS YEAR Tax Freedom Day fell on April 23. That means the average American spent nearly the first four months of 2008 earning the money to pay his or her federal, state, and local taxes. Those 113 days outnumber the 108 days most Americans will work to earn the money for food, clothing, and shelter -- combined.

Much of the money Americans pay in federal taxes comes back to them in the form of national defense, national parks, air-traffic control, and similar public goods that are proper federal responsibilities. But huge sums also get shuffled around and redistributed through a cornucopia of federal programs, from community-development block grants to GEAR UP, that many citizens have never heard of.

Those programs do good, no doubt. But "doing good" is not government's job. There is an infinite supply of good things that can be done, after all. Government's job is far more confined.

How much more good might be done if Washington left the dollars in the earners' pockets in the first place -- so they could spend the money on their own priorities instead of someone else's? How much money gets siphoned off for the staffing and overhead required to run the federal programs? How much time and effort get expended filling out federal forms and jumping through federal hoops? Whatever else the current system is, efficient it is not.

Nor is it fair. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter, "To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it."

NOR IS IT true to the spirit of the Constitution, which holds that any power not explicitly granted to Washington is forbidden. In 1794, Congress appropriated the then-princely sum of $15,000 for the relief of refugees from insurrection in San Domingo. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, rose to object: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution," he said, "which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." The getting and granting of such expenditures is today an enormous and lucrative industry.

On Friday, millions of Americans will put their right hands over their hearts as they say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the country Jefferson and Madison helped to found. The sentiment will be tarnished somewhat by the fact that so many of them will be dipping into their fellow citizens' wallets with the left.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.