Capture by faction has become endemic.
As government has grown and budgets and regulatory empires have expanded, economic and ideological factions have carved off satrapies in the agencies and congressional subcommittees.
The true greens control EPA. Unions have Labor and the NLRB.
The banks have the Fed and Treasury.
The energy companies used to have the Department of Energy, but now it is in the hands of the green crony capitalists.
Farm policy is controlled by a coalition of agricultural interests and food-stamp advocates.
HUD serves housing industry and urban constituencies.
HHS and its state satellites are a tool of the health-care industry -- my state senator in Montana deals with 63 health-care lobbyists, all of them focused on one thing: more money from the state.
Academia, teachers' unions, and the consulting industry control the Department of Education.
Public employees have become a powerful interest group in themselves.
And so on.
As government has grown and budgets and regulatory empires have expanded, economic and ideological factions have carved off satrapies in the agencies and congressional subcommittees.
The true greens control EPA. Unions have Labor and the NLRB.
The banks have the Fed and Treasury.
The energy companies used to have the Department of Energy, but now it is in the hands of the green crony capitalists.
Farm policy is controlled by a coalition of agricultural interests and food-stamp advocates.
HUD serves housing industry and urban constituencies.
HHS and its state satellites are a tool of the health-care industry -- my state senator in Montana deals with 63 health-care lobbyists, all of them focused on one thing: more money from the state.
Academia, teachers' unions, and the consulting industry control the Department of Education.
Public employees have become a powerful interest group in themselves.
And so on.
Conservatives keep arguing about Obama's political philosophy, but they miss the point. His strength is that he has none. He has no views on environmental or labor or health or education policy; whatever the interests that have been given that part of the government want is all right with him. His job is to assure each member of his coalition that it will indeed be given freedom of action, to mediate the occasional conflicts, and to serve as a mouthpiece when interest-group talking points are put on his teleprompter.
The system of capture by faction is also leading to huge and growing systemic corruption, as the beneficiaries tithe to whoever promises to keep the benefits flowing. Business has given up on efforts to support a market economy and devotes itself to competitive crony capitalism. For example, as George Gilder recently wrote in Knowledge and Power, the alternative-energy scams are ruining Silicon Valley by triggering a "general Gadarene rush for green subsidies" and "transform[ing] venture capitalists from heroic contributors to American innovation . . . into a pack of grubby petitioners for pork."
Only the Koch Brothers hold to the ideal of the free market without cronyism, which is why they are so thoroughly excoriated by the Progressives.
No comments:
Post a Comment