The national pastime is no longer baseball, it is rent-seeking — bending public power for private advantage. There are two reasons why rent-seeking has become so lurid, but those reasons for today’s dystopian politics are reasons why most suggested cures seem utopian.
The first reason is big government — the regulatory state. This year Washington will disperse $2.6 trillion, which is a small portion of Washington’s economic consequences, considering the costs and benefits distributed by incessant fiddling with the tax code, and by government’s regulatory fidgets.
Second, House Republicans, after 40 years in the minority, have, since 1994, wallowed in the pleasures of power. They have practiced DeLayism, or “K Street conservatism.” This involves exuberantly serving rent-seekers, who hire K Street lobbyists as helpers. For House Republicans the aim of the game is to build political support. But Republicans shed their conservatism in the process of securing their seats in the service, they say, of conservatism.
From the 1980s until 1994, Republicans campaigned against the corruption and influence peddling that had become common among members of an entrenched and unchallenged Democratic majority. When they came to power in 1994, they promised to change things, to reform Congress and reduce the size of government. Instead, they have become comfortable with power and have themselves become an entrenched majority acting more to preserve its own power than reform the system.
There are many reasons this has happened, but the reforms necessary to change things are quite simple:
The way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the government’s role in the allocation of wealth and opportunity. People serious about reducing the role of money in politics should be serious about reducing the role of politics in distributing money. But those most eager to do the former — liberals, generally — are the least eager to do the latter.
In other words, take away that $ 2.6 trillion budget, and there will be less for our Congress critters to play with. Another idea that Will suggests be revived is term limits, an idea that was abandoned almost as soon as the GOP became the majority
A surgical reform would be congressional term limits, which would end careerism, thereby changing the incentives for entering politics and for becoming, when in office, an enabler of rent-seekers in exchange for their help in retaining office forever. The movement for limits — a Madisonian reform to alter the dynamic of interestedness that inevitably animates politics — was surging until four months after Republicans took control of the House. In May 1995 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that congressional terms could not be limited by states’ statutes. Hence a constitutional amendment is necessary. Hence Congress must initiate limits on itself. That will never happen.
Unless these reforms are made, though, rent-seeking, corruption, and influence peddling will remain as common in Washington as the cherry blossoms in the spring.
At Outside The Beltway, James Joyner wonders if the Republicans in Congress will get the message:
One wonders if the dinosaur will understand the seriousness of the problem. While there’s a sense in which the canard with with the Republican faithful comfort ourselves–that it would be even worse if the Democrats ran Congress–is true, it’s also the case that it does not much seem as if Republicans run Congress, either. Indeed, with few exceptions, the Democrats could dust off the Contract With America and run on it this year.
My own assessment is that they will only get the message when they understand that their own jobs are in jeopardy.
Technorati Tags: Congress, Senate, GOP, Republican Party
