Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [97]
Any reform that would seek to weaken the ability of wealth to rent-seek would itself be resisted by wealth. So long as private money drives public elections, public officials will work hard to protect that private money. And if you doubt this, look to Wall Street: never has an industry been filled with more rabid libertarians; but never has an industry more successfully engineered government handouts when the gambling of those libertarians went south. When threatened with our existence, none of us—including principled libertarians—will stand on principle. The Right needs to recognize this as well as the Left.
All three examples point to a step in arguments from the Right that too many too often overlook. I’ve been in the middle of literally thousands of arguments in which someone on the Right (and I was that person for many years) invoked a common meme: something like “This problem too would be solved if we simply didn’t have such a big/invasive/expensive government.”
Maybe. But the point these three examples emphasize is that you can’t simply assume away the problem you’ve identified. If you believe big or expensive government is the problem, then what are you going to do to change it? How are you going to shrink it? What political steps will you take toward the end that you seek?
My sense is that too many on the Right make the same mistake as many on the Left. They assume that change happens when you win enough votes in Congress. Elect a strong Republican majority, many in the Tea Party believe, and you will elect a government that will deliver the promise of smaller government and simpler taxes—just as activists on the Left thought that they could elect a strong Democratic majority and deliver on the promise of meaningful health care reform, or global warming legislation, or whatever other reform the Left thought it would get.
What both sides miss is that the machine we’ve evolved systematically thwarts the objectives of each side. The reason for the thwart is different on each side. Change on the Left gets stopped because strong, powerful private interests use their leverage to block changes in the status quo. Change on the Right gets stopped because strong, powerful public interests, Congress, work to block any change that would weaken their fund-raising machine.
The point is not that the Right agrees with the Left. They don’t. The ends that both sides aim for are different.
But even if the Left and the Right don’t share common ends, they do share a common enemy. The current system of campaign funding radically benefits the status quo—the status quo for private interests and the status quo of the Fund-raising Congress.
The same dynamic will thus work against both types of reform. Private interests will flood D.C. with dollars to block change that affects them. And government interests, as in congressmen, will keep the grip tight on large, intrusive, complicated government, in part because it makes it easier to suck campaign dollars from the targets of regulation.
The existing system will always block the changes that both sides campaign for. Both sides should therefore have the same interest in changing this system.
This is not a new point, though it is strange how completely it gets forgotten. In 1999, Charles Kolb, a Republican and former George H. W. Bush administration official, led the Committee for Economic Development (CED) to take a major role in pushing for campaign finance reform. The CED describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan business led public policy organization.” Since 1942 the CED has pushed for “sustained economic growth.” It has been well known for pushing for that