Favors for Everyone Except the Taxpaying Masses

An editorial entitled Meet the New Special-Interest U.S. Congress by George Melloan continues an ongoing discussion about the perverse incentives that drive public sector behaviors:

...Taxpayers can rest easier now that the denizens of Capitol Hill have gone home for their August holiday. But those worthies have left behind a trail littered with the favors they've done for their special friends at the expense of the taxpaying masses...

The McCain-Feingold act, the current embodiment of years of campaign finance "reforms," was peddled as a law that would "take money out of politics." Oh, sure. Campaign spending set a record last fall, much of it provided indirectly from shadowy sources rather than up front and in public. Americans in some distant past had a largely unrestricted right to support candidates with their contributions, but a Congress uncomfortable with free choice chose to limit that power.

A case can be made that we are seeing the result of this limitation in the performance of the current Congress, which seems to have less regard than its predecessors for the broad public interest...

This near fiasco [the Cafta vote] for U.S. trade policy raises a question: How did lobbyists for a few business interests with little overall economic importance [See Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die] almost overwhelm the broad interests of the U.S. and its trading partners? One possible answer is that narrow interests can wield such power because...campaign-finance restrictions have so narrowed the financial support base for lawmakers that they have become more beholden to lobbies with the cash and know-how to defeat anyone who doesn't toe the line...

Before recess, the House also rushed to approve two big spending bills covering who knows what. In both the highway [see previous posting here] and energy bills the main concern was not the price tag or whether the money would be spent efficiently. It was to ensure that every member got a fair share for his state or district...

Apologists for all this profligacy argue that at least it "creates jobs." But none of those jobs comes with any cost-benefit test of the type that a private venture would have to pass to get funding. Thus there is no measure of whether the money spent adds or subtracts from human well-being.

There is very little concern for anything other than dividing up the tax-and-borrowing revenues so that every member, along with his coterie of supporters, gets a share...

Congress knows it has a spending problem, just as alcoholics are aware that they have a drinking problem. The late Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan once said to Journal editors, "It doesn't do any good for you to yell at us -- we just can't help it."

He may have been right. Congress has made various stabs at setting up a "congressional budget process" that would reconcile the various spending bills and keep them within some agreed-upon total. But somehow the machinery just never seems to work. It keeps getting overwhelmed by the pressures of political logrolling...

A broader argument is that money holds the republic together. By sharing it out, the federal government buys the loyalty of a broad variety of constituencies, thereby insuring national unity. In politics, "fairness" is a very big word, even if it is only applied to those who receive federal largesse and seldom to those taxpayers who cough it up.

If "fairness" is the guiding principle, perhaps it should apply to the equal treatment under the law of everyone who wants to express his constitutional right to free expression by supporting, financially, the candidate of his choice. The result might be that members of Congress would become less beholden to special interests and more concerned with the common good...

It is worth repeating a paragraph from an earlier posting:

A more complete discussion of the perverse incentives that exist within the public sector are discussed in the posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest, where numerous links provide the opportunity to dive more deeply into both the root causes and the symptoms of an irresponsible, out-of-control public sector.