Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 98
The only effective way to keep power decentralized is by making sure our society provides ungovernmental ways of being powerful. The best talents should be offered bait in places other than Washington. Let the good and the great flounce around in the arts, spout pious bilge from pulpits, fill the minds of the young with drivel at great universities, spread patronizing smarm through charitable organizations, and rob all comers in business. Just one ready, necessary thing is needed to set the hook in this lure of decentralization. Thank God for money. And whenever we meet a rich person, however loathsome, we should be sure to say, “Thanks! The disgusting fact of your existence helps spread the manure of life around and keeps it from piling up in one spot, under the Capitol dome.”
Political power, however, remains the most powerful of powers, so people will continue to be drawn to it. What kind of people we know too well. The politician’s personality has been brilliantly described.
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration … beginning by early adulthood … as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. has grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance
3. believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
4. requires excessive admiration
5. has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
6. is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her ends
7. lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8. is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
The authors of the above passage had no idea they were writing about politics. They thought they were writing about mental illness. This perceptive analysis of politicians appears on page 717 of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Medical Disorders, fourth edition, under the heading “Diagnostic Criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”
The only thing in the shrinks’ notes that might seem odd to a voter is “lack of empathy.” Every politician is always telling us how much sympathy, understanding, and fellowship he or she has with us and how deeply he or she is moved by our hopes, our dreams, and our fears. About such too much protestation, Hamlet’s mother—no mean politician herself—has an oft-quoted line.
There is an enormously powerful machine that with one wrong turn can kill us all and it’s being run by crazy people. What are the chances this will turn out well?
In the meantime it’s costing us a fortune. Milton and Rose Friedman, in their seminal work about liberty and market freedoms, Free to Choose, showed why government is so expensive. The Friedmans devised what in logic is called a “truth table” to show that there are, logically, only four categories of spending. The table looks like this:
Category I is you spending your money on yourself. Let’s take cars as an example of something to spend on and me as an example of someone doing the spending. I have a splendid 1990 Porsche 911—a leftover from my carefree bachelor days—that I got a great deal on, buying it almost new from a dentist who scared himself and bought a Lexus Coupe instead. When you spend your money on yourself you get—as nearly as you can—exactly what you want and you bargain as hard as you can for it.
In Category II, when you’re spending your money on someone else, you still bargain hard. But you’re not quite as concerned about getting exactly what’s wanted. Although I’m sure my wife is very fond of the Geo Tracker I bought for her and the kids.
You spend someone else’s money on yourself in Category III, and I’m on the fence between the Aston Martin DBS coupe that goes for close to $300,000 and letting “someone else” off easy with an Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione spider convertible, a steal at $230,000.
With Category IV you’re not involved at all. It’s not your money and nothing’s in it for you. So it might as well be billions spent on jack shit or, as the government called it, “Cash for Clunkers.”
All government spending is done in Category IV.
There are very few excuses for allowing goods and services to be allocated by political means unless you’re trying to get something that isn’t yours. And what you get is a Geo Tracker. That’s one Geo Tracker for you versus innumerable reasons for the rest of us to prevent you from allocating goods and services by political means. Make that innumerable plus three.
1. Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.
2. Invisible opportunities.
3. Committee Brain.
One of the things that allows us to be eaten up by our politics is that we are eaten very slowly, one political bug bite at a time. If we were being eaten by a boa constrictor or Kim Jong Il we’d notice. But in a democracy it takes years for us to wake up and say, as Ronald Reagan so memorably said in the 1942 movie Kings Row, “Where’s the rest of me?” Not until almost forty years later, when Reagan was running for president, did we taxpayers finally come to our senses and ask the same question about our paychecks.
The first secret of our obliviousness to being swallowed is what’s called “diffuse costs.” A government idiocy may be expensive, but the expense is spread so broadly that none of us feels the nip of that expense very hard. For instance, let’s take a government idiocy that’s quite expensive and, furthermore, obviously and evidently useless to the nation, and which doesn’t even have any political support. Joe Biden. Joe Biden costs us $227,300 a year in salary plus $90,000 for official entertainment expenses. (O’Doul’s, because somebody has to keep a clear head during those White House Beer Summits.) Then there are the tens of thousands spent on around-the-clock White House staffers trying to keep Joe Biden’s mouth shut and more tens of thousands for shoe shines, black neckties, and Air Force 2 fuel when unimportant foreign leaders die, and at least $20 worth of Secret Service protection. We’ll round it off and take a guess and say that Joe Biden costs us $600,000 a year. But there are 300 million of us. Yes, Joe is a complete waste of two-tenths of a cent, but who cares?
Joe does. That is the “concentrated benefits” part of “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.” The two-tenths of a cent means nothing to us, but it’s everything in the world to Joe Biden who will bear any burden, meet any hardship, pay any price (well, no, we’ll pay the price), even go on Bill O’Reilly to remain one and a half heartbeats from the presidency. (The half a heartbeat is the time it will take Nancy Pelosi to wring his neck and become president herself.) And so it goes with other government idiocies even more expensive than Joe such as AIG and Homeland Security.
The expense of politics wouldn’t matter so much if it weren’t for the opportunities that are destroyed by this spending. Money that’s poured down rat holes can’t be used to pay the Pied Piper. (Not that the government of Hamelin town did pay the Pied Piper.) These destroyed opportunities—or “opportunity costs,” as economists call them—are the flip side of zero-sum. It is a source of wickedness to believe that the world contains a fixed amount of resources. Paradoxically, it is a source of wickedness to forget that the world does contain a fixed amount of resources, at any given moment. The amount of resources is infinitely expandable, but in order to expand it we have to spend the resources we currently have on something other than Joe Biden.
Because our opportunities are lost—so lost they never got anywhere near us—it’s easy and maybe comforting to forget about them. These opportunities are certainly invisible to politicians. They don’t see the businesses that weren’t started, the innovations that weren’t pursued, the charitable donations that weren’t made, and the beer I didn’t drink because a jerk professor and a college-town cop (talk about a fight I don’t have a dog in) drank it in the White House backyard.
Meanwhile politicians work themselves into a lather of rationalization about the benefits of government spending. In this they are aided by the more vile kinds of economists such as Paul Krugman and the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Using liberal political-economic reasoning I can prove … anything. I can prove that shooting convenience store clerks stimulates the economy.
Jobs are created in the high-paying domestic manufacturing sector at gun and ammunition factories. Additional emergency medical technicians, security guards, health care providers, and morticians are hired. The unemployment rate is lowered as job seekers fill new openings on convenience store night shifts. And money stolen from convenience store cash registers stimulates the economy where stimulus is most needed, in low-income neighborhoods where the people who shoot convenience store clerks go to buy their crack.
I am simply flabbergasted that the Democratic majority in the House and Senate isn’t smoking crack and shooting convenience store clerks this very minute, considering all the good it does.
The expense of politics is bad, the political destruction of opportunities is very bad, but nothing is as dreadful as the brain of a politician.
Ha. Ha. Ha. What brain? Alas, it’s worse than a joke. Taken one by one, politicians are of dull-normal intelligence. But when you put politicians together in governments you get committees. In Congress they even come right out and call the committees committees.
We’ve all been on committees. We know what happens to intelligence and common sense when a person becomes a committee member—Committee Brain.
You live in a neighborhood with a playground. The kids in the neighborhood would like to play tetherball but the playground has no tetherball pole. A committee is formed to raise funds for tetherball: Committee to Raise Funds for Tetherball, CRFT.
CRFT is started by a group of pleasant, enthusiastic, public-spirited neighbors. The minute any of these neighbors becomes a member of CRFT he or she will begin to express his or her pleasant, enthusiastic public spirit by turning into one of the following.
The Martinet
We have to draw up a charter and form a nonprofit corporation with a chairman, a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, development officer, and human resources executive. And the tetherball pole has to be exactly nine meters high, in accordance with North American Amateur Tetherball Association rules.
The Dog in the Manger
We need to get permission from the County Zoning Board, the City Council, the Parks Department, and adjacent landowners who may complain about tetherball noise. That part of the playground is too damp for tetherball. It might be federally protected wetlands. We can’t do any fund-raising without advertising. We can’t advertise without raising funds. The kids would rather have a tennis court.
The Person Who Is Stupid Even by Committee Brain Standards
So the rope, like, has a ball on it?
The Worrier
Padded pole, breakaway tether, a lightweight foam ball, and ban on playing after dark or when visibility is poor and when the sun is shining, to avoid UV ray skin cancer damage. The kids should wear helmets and kneepads and safety belts.
The Person with Ideas
If we call ourselves the “Committee to Raise American Funds for Tetherball—Yeah!” we can use the acronym CRAFTY. Let’s set up a challenge grant to erect a second tetherball pole in the inner city. “Midnight Tetherball” could be an alternative to crime for deprived youth. We can also promote tetherball as a way to combat child obesity, which would make us eligible for funding from the Gates Foundation. We’ll have a tetherball league—no, three—Adults, Juniors, and Tether Tots. This could be a great Title IX thing. If our daughters are varsity-level tetherball players they’ll get into Yale.
The Person with Ideas, None of Which Has Anything to Do with Tetherball
Is the tether biodegradable? Is the pole made from recycled materials? Many playground balls are manufactured in third world countries using exploitative child labor. Let’s be sure to utilize organic fertilizer and indigenous plant species when seeding the tetherball play area.
The Bossy Person
Who says the same thing as everyone else on the committee but louder.
The Person Who Won’t Shut Up
Who says the same thing as everyone else on the committee but more often.
The Person Who Won’t Show Up
Unless his or her vote is crucial, in which case he or she shows up and votes the wrong way.
You
You actually do all the work and call forty people and ask them each to donate $20, and half of them do, and you raise the $400 needed, only to find out you need $400,000 because the House of Representatives’ Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee’s Select Committee on Opportunities in Physical Education’s Subcommittee on Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance requires all tetherballs to be wheelchair-accessible no matter how high the tetherballs fly in the air.
Given the complete dominance of politics by Committee Brain, the wonder is that anything gets done, and the horror is that it does. What government accomplishes is what you’d expect from a committee. “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” is a saying that couldn’t be more wrong. A camel is a seeing-eye dog designed by a committee and available free with government grants to people who can see perfectly well but can’t walk.
Yet committees are ancient and ubiquitous in our civilization. Moses goes to a business conference with God and the next thing you know, Exodus 32:1, “the people gathered themselves together.” And someone says, “All in favor of worshipping a golden calf …”
Same thing in the Roman Senate: “All in favor of relinquishing power to Caesar, then stabbing him …”
And again in the boardrooms of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Fannie Mae: “All in favor of investing in loans to people who made loans to people who made loans to people with houses that aren’t worth pissing on if they catch fire …”
Committees persist although their decisions are almost invariably stupid. Therefore committees must provide some value to our civilization with their stupidity. And they do. In fact it could be suggested that our freedoms find their surest protection in stupidity.
We owe the thought to Lord Brougham, another of nineteenth-century Britain’s great defenders of liberty. As Lord Chancellor, Brougham led the fights in Parliament that would abolish slavery in 1833 and pass the Reform Bill of 1832 broadening the electorate and making seats in Parliament more nearly representational. Brougham (who, incidentally, had a style of fancy carriage named after him, set the fashion for going to the Riviera, and became himself quite stupid later in life) said, “All we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.”
In other words, what makes and keeps us free is a committee—the jury. Governments have the legal monopoly on deadly force, and, in a free country, the thing that prevents the government from forcing us into prison or onto the lethal injection gurney any time it likes is the need for a jury verdict. Our government cannot inflict any punishment or penalty upon us unless what we have done is so obviously wrong and outrageously bad that even a feebleminded, asinine, obtuse, muddled, stubborn, and silly committee, which never agrees on anything, agrees.
Taxes
Taxes are a good thing. “Every tax,” said Adam Smith, “is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty. It denotes that he is subject to government, indeed, but that, as he has some property, he cannot himself be the property of a master.”
We’re tempted to answer Smith with the “We don’t need no stinking badges” quote from the movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but the sage of economic freedom has a point. We cannot be expected to surrender rights in our property—that is, pay taxes—unless we are understood to have property rights, and chief among property rights is our right to the property of ourselves. We’re free. Even when taxes are levied by force, first they have to catch us.
Also, taxes caused democracy. When England’s Charles I had to go, crown in hand, to beg Parliament for tax revenues, an elected body was able to claim sovereignty and dispatch with the divine right of kings (and King Charles’s head).
Our own Revolutionary War was precipitated by taxes. “No taxation without representation” was a slogan among the American patriots, a crowd of whom would protest such taxes at the Boston Tea Party in 1773. (And the original Tea Partiers, like their later-day namesakes, were regarded with contempt by well-placed know-it-alls. Peter Oliver, chief justice of Massachusetts, said of Samuel Adams, “He never failed of employing his Abilities to the vilest Purposes.”)
The French Revolution, too, was a result of taxes. Louis XVI needed to raise them and, looking to do so, convened the states-general, a group of delegates from the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. A cutthroat bunch they proved to be.
We owe a lot to our taxes. But we owe a lot on our taxes too. That is why the most surprisingly good thing about taxes is that they are a good deal.
The American government will spend $4 trillion this year. There are an estimated 308.6 million Americans. We each get $12,956. Sure we mostly get it in the form of Sacramento light rail projects that don’t go anywhere except Sacramento, sugar beet price supports, contributions to the charity known as GM, Afghanistan troop surges, and interest payments on Chinese-owned T bills. We’d rather have cash. But, still, $12,956 isn’t bad.
