In hopes of learning some lessons, let’s take a tour through the dank sewer of government, the place where malice is rewarded and malfeasance is a stepping stone to success.
Writing for the Washington Post, Professor Stephen Medvic argues that America’s political system is mostly clean.
…there is very little political corruption in the United States. …According to Transparency International’s 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index, a survey of expert opinion about the level of corruption in 167 countries, only 15 countries were judged to be cleaner than the United States. …our score of 76 (out of 100) was considerably higher than the average score of 67 in the European Union and Western Europe.
But before concluding that Mr. Medvic is a crazy crack addict, he is using a very narrow definition of corruption in the above excerpt, focusing on politicians who trade votes for under-the-table money that goes into their personal bank accounts.
Using a broader definition, there’s a different conclusion.
…corruption happens whenever there is a privileging of private interests over the public good in the policymaking process. Under this interpretation, while elected officials may not be reaping private benefit from their positions of power, theyare placing the (private) interests of some subset of the public above the collective interests of the people as a whole. When a politically powerful industry gets public subsidies or a well-connected corporation receives a special tax break, it suggests to some that the system has been corrupted.
And from this perspective, corruption is rampant.
Here are six examples.
First, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center describes how a Louisiana politician (gee, what a surprise) wants to use government coercion to hinder competition in the market for contact lenses.
An estimated 40 million Americans wear contact lenses. That’s a $4 billion industry. Thanks to the heavy-handed government regulation of all things health care, contacts already cost more than they should. However, if an ongoing effort to reduce competition through government cronyism were to succeed, costs might soon rise even more. …a bill was introduced by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., called the Contact Lens Consumer Health Protection Act of 2016, which would place pointless and costly new mandates on sellers and eliminate market competition. …it would require dedicated phone lines and email addresses for prescribers to communicate questions to sellers about the prescriptions the sellers need them to verify before the sellers are allowed to fill orders. …With this move, these special interests demonstrate that they would rather avoid the grind of competition, which requires that companies deliver high-quality goods at low prices to consumers. Instead, they’re trying to rig the system to force consumers into paying more for less.
Paying more for less? Maybe that should be Washington’s motto, though it’s hard to argue with the existing motto.
Second, Mike Needham of Heritage Action exposes how a shoe company cut a sleazy deal with the Obama White House.
Currently, new Army and Air Force recruits can use a one-time stipend to choose from about a dozen different shoes from multiple manufacturers. …shoe choice is exceedingly important for not only comfort, but also to prevent injury. Despite the differences that exist among the military’s roughly 250,000 new recruits every year, there is an effort afoot to force those recruits to wear shoes made by just one company. During last month’s mark up of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Massachusetts Democrat Niki Tsongas added language that would effectively force the Department of Defense (DoD) to provide only New Balance athletic shoes for new military recruits. …This alone reeks of the revolving door politics the political left is usually swift to condemn, but it gets even worse. Last month, New Balance revealed the company disengaged from the fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership last year because it had cut a secret deal with the Obama administration. …Using the legislative process to limit choice and competition is par for the course in our corrupt political system, but doing so at the expense of America’s brave sons and daughters outrageous.
Unfortunately, wasting money is a Pentagon tradition.
Third, here’s a typical story of insider dealing in the bureaucracy.
A Department of Veterans Affairs manager who steered a $4 million contract to a relative was promoted to the second-highest position in the hospital weeks after she was caught and exposed in the national media. …The hospital evaluated 16 plots, five of which were owned by relatives of Gillis. A committee ranked them by suitability, and a non-Gillis plot was determined to be best. But in an “unusual” move, the VA selected land owned by William Gillis instead, and paid him $4.25 million. …Within three months, in June 2015, Gillis was put on a detail to serve as acting associate director, the second-highest position in the hospital, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. The elevation was a big promotion considering the fact that others were more senior and higher-ranked.
I suspect Gillis was one of the VA bureaucrats to also get a fat bonus despiteshoddy treatment of America’s veterans.
Fourth, a former Senator is now lobbying to help H&R Block stifle competition for mom and pop tax preparers.
Former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) has registered to lobby on behalf of the tax preparation company H&R Block. Kyl and a colleague at his new employer, Covington & Burling, will advocate on behalf of H&R Block in favor of the “creation of minimum standards for paid tax preparers,” according to a registration form. …H&R Block has also hired another firm, Fierce Government Relations, that it is lobbying on “oversight of tax preparation” for the company. Forbes-Tate and Rock Creek Counsel also lobby for H&R Block, and the company has its own in-house lobbyists.
Yet another example of a Republican advocating bigger government to line his own pockets.
Fifth, here’s another probable example of insider dealing.
U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won the first-phase construction contract for California’s high-speed rail. …If I didn’t witness the insanity and corruption in politics every day, I wouldn’t have believed this. “The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but “low” is a relative term,” the Laer Pearce, author of Crazifornia wrote. ”The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.”
Wasting money on a high-speed rail boondoggle is bad enough, but steering the contract to the spouse of a senior politician adds insult to injury.
Sixth, let’s look at how a former Obama appointee is getting rich because of regulations he oversaw while in government.
Even progressives need to make a living. …Some of them are even smart enough to do it by exploiting the regulations they pushed while in government. …Jim Shelton, the deputy secretary of education in 2013 and 2014…became “chief impact officer” at 2U, a publicly traded company that caters to public and nonprofit colleges and universities. …it’s especially notable that Mr. Shelton has joined 2U because its for-profit online business model allows it to circumvent the onerous regulation that the Department of Education promoted to punish for-profit schools during Mr. Shelton’s tenure. …This rule…has forced even the best for-profit schools to shrink enrollments. Students who have suffered the most tend to be low-income and minorities… The rule has one giant loophole. It doesn’t apply to nonprofit or public universities, and it also largely exempts community colleges. Many of these have graduation rates or loan default rates that are as bad or worse than for-profits… Which works out beautifully now for Mr. Shelton and 2U, which can work around the gainful-employment rule and still make a buck. 2U’s customers don’t have to meet the rule.
Sounds like a scene out of Atlas Shrugged, right?
So what’s the solution to all this sleaze in the Washington Favor Factory?
Returning to the column from Prof. Medvic, he seems to think that the problem is money.
The real problem is…that economic elites and business organizations have a greater impact on policy outcomes than do groups representing average citizens. …the playing field is tilted toward those with money. …the problem with money in politics is that it undermines an essential principle of democratic government.
That’s wrong. Laughably wrong.
The problem is that government has too much power. If we want to reduce sordid dealmaking (and the six examples listed above are a very tiny tip of a very large iceberg), then we need to reduce the size and scope of Washington.
Which is the message of this video.
I suppose the easy thing to do at this stage is to attack politicians for constantly expanding the size and scope of government. And I certainly have done that. A lot.
But let’s not overlook the role of culture. The crowd in Washington gets away with lots of venal behavior because an ever-larger share of the population is losing the spirit of self reliance and personal responsibility.
With that in mind, there’s very little reason for optimism once people decide that it’s okay to steal from their neighbors so long as they use government as a middleman.
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Image credit: Martin Jacobsen | CC BY-SA 3.0.
