Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [18]
Instead, the story of our Congress is these two previous chapters added together:
We have a gaggle of good souls who have become dependent in a way that weakens the democracy, and
We have a nation of good souls who see that dependency, and assume the worst.
The first flaw bends policy. The second flaw weakens the public’s trust. The two together condemn the republic, unless we find a way to reform at least one.
PART II
TELLS
None of us are expert—enough. We each may know a great deal about something, but none of us know enough about the wide range of things that we must understand if we’re to understand the issues of government today.
For those bits that we don’t understand, we rely upon institutions. But whether we trust those institutions will depend upon how they seem to us: how they are crafted, and whether they are built to insulate the actors from the kind of influences we believe might make their decisions untrustworthy.
We don’t have a choice about this. We can’t simply decide to know everything about everything, or decide to ignore the things that make us suspicious. We are human. We will respond in human ways. And we will believe long before scientists can prove. Thus we must build institutions that take into account what we believe, especially when those beliefs limit our ability to trust.
Including the institutions of government: We don’t have a choice about whether to have government. There are too many interconnected struggles that we as a people face. There may well be a conservative or libertarian or liberal response to those struggles. But all sensible sides believe there’s a role for government in at least some of these struggles, even if some believe that role is less than others.
When the government plays its role, we need to be able to trust it. Not trust that it will do whatever we want, for sometimes our party loses, and when it does, we lose the right to demand that the government do the right (from our perspective) thing. But whether we’ve won or lost, we need to trust that the government is acting for the (politically) correct reasons: liberal, if liberals have won; conservative, if conservatives have won; libertarian, if libertarians have won. We need to believe that the government is tracking the sort of interests it was intended to track. Or at least, as Marc Hetherington puts it, that the “government is producing outcomes consistent with [our] expectations.”1
When the actions of government conflict with those expectations, we will look beyond trust, for other reasons, to see whether they might explain the puzzle. Other reasons, such as money in the wrong places. When we find it—when we see that money was in the wrong place—it will affect us. It will weaken our trust in government. It will undermine our motivation to engage.
In this section, I select four policy struggles and point to puzzles about each. I then stand these puzzles next to some facts about money that might or might not have affected each struggle. The drama here is not always as pronounced as with BPA or cell phones. But the exercise is crucial to understanding the kind of trouble our republic is facing.
CHAPTER 4
Why Don’t We Have Free Markets?
Type 2 diabetes is a disease that causes the body to misuse its own insulin. Overproduction of insulin causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance increases the level of free fatty acids in the bloodstream, and the level of sugar. Out-of-whack levels of fatty acids and sugar do no good. The direct harms are bad enough. Indirect harms include the loss of limbs, blindness, kidney failure, and heart disease.1
In 1985 only 1 to 2 percent of children with diabetes had type 2 diabetes. Of the adults with diabetes, 90 to 95 percent had type 2.2 Over the past two decades, these numbers