Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [99]
The populist view is wrong. What we know from economics, and from experience with governments across the world, is that if you underpay government officials relative to their talents or their peers, they will find ways to supplement their income. Those supplements are not cost-free, even if they cost the Treasury nothing. They sometimes involve outright bribes. (Norman Ornstein explains the “inexplicable petty corruption of powerhouses like Dan Rostenkowski and Ted Stevens… by their belief that they were making such immense sacrifices to stay in public service.”)4 But in America, at least with members of Congress and senior members of the administration, that sort of bribery is not the problem. The real danger is that policy gets bent, through the unavoidable influence spread by those who need the favor of government. If, as Congressman Jim Cooper told me, “Capitol Hill has become a farm league for K Street,” then no one should doubt that players on a farm league do everything they can to get to the majors.
Yet the purpose of this chapter is not to argue that we should increase the salaries of government officials. We should. But so, too, should people stop smoking and stop “breakfasting” at Dunkin’ Donuts. There’s a limit to what’s possible. I recognize that limit here. I’m not going to fell trees on the fool’s errand of trying to persuade you to rally with me to increase Barney Frank’s pay.
Instead, the point of this chapter is to underline why the fact that we underpay government officials will make it much harder to change how Congress now works. The very mechanisms that we have evolved to compensate for our undercompensated government workers make change through ordinary political means enormously difficult, and, just maybe, impossible.5
The Ways We Pay Congress
Some in Congress don’t give a squat about how much they’re paid. Some don’t care because they’re millionaires. (Indeed, 44 percent of members of Congress are millionaires, compared with 1 percent of the American public.)6 Some of them spent millions to get to Congress in the first place. To them, government service is a luxury good. They are proud to serve. They’d be proud to serve even if the salary were zero (or negative—which it is for most who self-fund their campaigns).
Others don’t care about how much they’re paid because they’re married to wealthy spouses. That spousal income is sometimes completely benign. (Senator Ron Wyden’s [D-Ore.; 1981–] wife owns the Strand bookstore in New York City. There are not many policies that get bent by the influence of used-book store owners.) Sometimes it is much less benign. (When Indiana senator Evan Bayh [D-Ind.; 1999–2011] was elected to the U.S. Senate, his thirty-eight-year-old wife, a junior law professor at Butler University and a mid-level attorney at Eli Lilly, got appointed to the board of the insurance company that would become WellPoint. No doubt Susan Bayh is a talented soul. But as the website TheStreet commented when the appointment was made, “Her work background at the time she was appointed… would have been surprising, given that she had no insurance experience and was relatively young and inexperienced to serve as a director on a multibillion-dollar board.”7 One can’t help but wonder whether that appointment would have been made but for the marriage, or whether the policies of the senator weren’t affected by the affiliations of the spouse.8) But in most cases, these members with wealthy spouses are not likely looking for ways to make things easier financially for themselves.
Finally, some members don’t care about the size of their salaries because they come from inexpensive districts, and don’t have kids, and do okay on the salary Congress provides. They share an apartment in D.C. with a colleague. They come home as frequently as they can. They find JCPenney to be an especially talented fashion designer.
Put all of these three types