Corruption and Hypocrisy

The Republicans and Democrats and their respective friends in the media are now engaged in a great debate over who between them is more corrupt, and each party makes an amusingly good case. However, the really amusing thing is the absurdity and hypocrisy of the politicians’ claimed expectations that things in Washington should be other than corrupt.

Look at the actual activity of the Congress. Each year they are sitting on a pile of about two trillion dollars that the IRS has taken from its rightful owners, and they get to decide who gets it. They divide it up. That fact that there is often corruption in such a process is not remarkable. The wonder – and one of the triumphs of our liberal, democratic, republican form of government – is that they are not murdering each other in the streets over it.

It is a crucial and valid insight of the libertarians that the financing of government is always and everywhere an essentially criminal activity. Whether by outright seizure and expropriation or by the extortion under threat that is taxation, governments get their money by stealing it.

(To see this, consider a simple example that libertarians often use. A couple have a shop in a city and own a small building. In addition to their normal overhead, each year they have to make two large involuntary payment of one thousand dollars each. The first payment goes to a person called a gangster and is for what is called protection. They give the gangster a thousand dollars each year so that their shop is not vandalized or burned down. The second is to a person called a tax collector. They give the tax collector a thousand dollars each year so that their shop is not seized for back taxes and sold at auction. While the actions of the gangster are illegal, and the actions of the tax collector are legal, and while the money taken by the tax collector may be used for better purposes than the money taken by the gangster, both acts are extortion. It seems impossible to deny this without destroying the meaning of the word or resorting to a legal positivism that asserts that the right and the legal are coextensive and even equivalent. )

This does not mean, as the anarchists claim, that there should be no government or that we shouldn’t pay our taxes. The traditionally used term is apt and correct. Government is a necessary evil. It must be vigilantly watched and carefully limited to prevent tyranny. But in the world as it is, our government is essential for freedom, prosperity and a civil society.

However, the fact of taxation as extortion does mean that we should be careful of what we allow the government to take and suspicious of politicians who always want to take more. It also means we should ask of each government program whether it is worth robbing our neighbors for. And it certainly means that, given the current size and scope of our government, we should have the grace and good sense not be surprised when we learn that corruption creeps into the division of the spoils.

Unserious on Energy

In considering the actions and pronouncements of governments and politicians, it is often useful to ask a simple question. Are they serious, or are they just grandstanding and protecting their phony baloney jobs? Answering that question can help a person to guess what the real results will be.
For example, politicians of almost all sorts talk about the need to make public K12 education better. However, for all the blathering about crises and taking care of the children, one is struck by how unseriously they approach the issue. Politicians may call better education a priority or even an imperative, but their actions show that they do not really mean it. Protecting the teachers unions, sending money to their states and districts, and mouthing platitudes for the mommies seem to be the real imperatives. There is no concerted effort to analyze the current system, identify its structural and operational weaknesses, consider alternatives, establish appropriate objectives, find solutions and move to implement them. In short, the politicians who are shouting the loudest about education are doing none of the things that a sensible person would do if he wanted to turn around a failing system or organization. So it is reasonable to conclude that the politicians are in fact okay with the status quo except that some of them want to fund it better, and that, sadly, American K12 education won’t be getting much better anytime soon.
We can ask the same question about oil and energy. We in the United States are buying oil at outrageously inflated prices, much of it from government monopolies in unstable and often anti-American countries. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others use revenue from oil to support terrorist murderers. Venezuela, a formerly reliable source of oil, is now under the rule of an anti-American nut case. We find ourselves shoveling vast sums of money to people who will use at least some of it to try to destroy us. This is not a good situation, and our politicians are finally worked up about it. However, as with education, the lack of seriousness is clear.
Some of our public servants just blame the oil companies. Though they fail to explain why the companies are so much greedier in 2006 than they were five years ago when oil was below twenty dollars a barrel, they get a lot of TV time and stir up a lot of ignorant people.
Others demand that America become self sufficient in energy while insisting that we not drill in Alaska or the east or west coasts, not build new nuclear plants, not burn more coal, not use oil shale, and even not put windmills in any places where they might offend well bred rich folks. Some demand policies and rules that discourage progress and innovation in energy production, and then rant that the foreigners have us over a barrel. Some want to impose dracononian conservation mandates and raise taxes on consumption just so long as they don't anger any voters or raise the price of gas or anything. Some just want more pork. (In fairness there are people in Congress making sensible and productive proposals. However, they are not getting them passed.)
This is not to say that the politicians haven’t been coming up with brilliant technical solutions and vast plans of their own. They have, and so we are now supposed to be using grass clippings to make diesel fuel and corn liquor as a subsidized replacement for gasoline.
We can guess from all this demagoguery and nonsense that not much will happen, and that the government will rock along with the status quo except for more pork for corn producers and maybe extra taxes for oil companies. We will have to hope that the companies and individuals in the energy industries can in time find ways to give this country the power and independence it will need in spite of impediments from our government. While bad enough, that is far from a worst case. Our government could be doing something big and decisive on its own about energy. Then we would be in trouble. It looks as though we will be safe from that.