Pay-to-Play: Why the Fuss?
Monday, December 15, 2008
By Thomas J. DiLorenzo
LewRockwell.com
Lysander Spooner
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[G]overnment,
like a highwayman, says to a man: "Your money or your life."
~
Lysander Spooner
[T]he
state is an inherently illegitimate institution of . . . organized
. . . crime against the persons and properties of its subjects.
~ Murray
Rothbard
The Washington
establishment and its kept media are feigning outrage over the fact
that the governor of Illinois has been selling political favors.
So far, the biggest laugh line came from federal prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald, who claimed that Abraham Lincoln would roll over in
his grave if he were to know that an Illinois politician was selling
political favors to the highest bidder. In reality, Lincoln would
be rolling his eyes over the stupidity of such a statement.
As Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald has noted,
Lincoln’s aspiration as a young pol was to be "the DeWitt Clinton
of Illinois." DeWitt Clinton was the governor of New York who
is "credited" with having invented the spoils system.
By the time
Lincoln ran for president, writes David Donald, he had become the
master string puller in Illinois politics. He was what would today
be called a "lobbyist" for the railroad corporations.
In the late 1830s he led the effort to get the Illinois legislature
to spend more than $10 million on "internal improvements"
of roads and canals, none of which were ever finished; much of the
money was stolen; and the taxpayers of Illinois were put deep into
debt for many years. A Chicago politician is what we would call
him today – a precursor of Mayor Daley and Congressman (and convicted
felon) Danny Rostenkowski.
As president,
one of Lincoln’s very first acts was to call Congress into a special
session in June of 1861 to begin work on the Pacific Railroad Bill,
which would eventually result in the greatest spectacle of graft
and corruption in American history up to that point (the Credit
Mobilier scandal). Lincoln benefitted personally from this legislation
which gave him, the president, the right to choose the eastern starting
point of the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad. He
chose Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he had recently purchased a large
parcel of real estate that is known to this day as "Lincoln’s
hill." Many of Lincoln’s Republican Party luminaries, from
Thaddeus Stevens to Justin Morrill and Oakes Ames, and even General
Sherman, accumulated fortunes through graft and patronage that was
created by Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad Bill (see my book, Lincoln
Unmasked
).
The even
bigger absurdity of the establishment’s "outrage" over
the behavior of the Illinois governor is highlighted by the fact
that selling political favors defines what Washington politics (and
all other politics in America) is all about. With the lone exception
of Congressman Ron Paul, every Washington politician spends most
of his time selling political favors of one kind or another. Legislation
and regulation is "sold" for campaign "contributions,"
kickbacks, highly-paid jobs for relatives and friends, and various
"in-kind" goodies. It’s what they do. It’s what politics
is about. The governor of Illinois is not guilty of anything more
than what almost every single politician in Washington does every
single day.
Government
has become so adept at selling political favors that scholarly treatises
have been written about a veritable science of "political extortion."
A case in point would be the book Money
for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion
,
by Fred S. McChesney (Harvard University Press, 1997). Much has
been written about governments granting favors to businesses in
return for "campaign contributions" or outright kickbacks,
but McChesney focuses on an even more insidious phenomenon: politicians
threatening to impose menacing costs on businesses or entire industries
with regulation and taxation as "a form of political extortion
or blackmail."
Political
extortion or blackmail may take the form of threats of price controls,
for example, or threats to withdraw occupational licenses, corporate
charters or building permits. Or it can come in the form of threats
to raise the cost of doing business through a special excise tax
or an especially onerous regulation. The purpose of the threats,
McChesney explains, is to solicit bribes (i.e. campaign contributions/kickbacks)
from the threatened businesses or industries. Politicians even have
their own language of political extortion and blackmail. McChesney
quotes one pol as describing how, early in his career, he "came
across the concept of ‘milker bills’." "Representative
Sam, in need of campaign contributions, has a bill introduced which
excites some constituency to urge Sam to work hard for its defeat
(easily achieved), pouring funds into his campaign coffers and ‘forever’
endearing Sam to his constituency for his effectiveness."
"Cash
cows" is another name for legislation that is threatened in
order to "milk" campaign "contributions" from
threatened industries and individuals. And then there are "juice
bills" that are designed to "squeeze" cash out of
threatened businesses. Not to be excluded from our political lexicon
are "fetcher bills," designed for the same purpose – to
"fetch" cash from corporate lobbyists with threatening
legislation.
Among
the examples of such political extortion cited by McChesney are:
- Product
liability legislation that is proposed periodically to fetch campaign
cash from both sides of the debate.
- Proposed
legislation to restrict futures trading that fetches loads of
cash from futures traders.
- Proposed
price controls on pharmaceuticals, which squeezed millions from
the pharmaceutical industry.
- Proposed
price controls on cable television, which had the same effect.
- Proposals
to ban smoking altogether, or to impose even more onerous tobacco
taxes, always fetches millions from the tobacco companies.
- Proposals
to increase excise taxes on alcoholic beverages are tried and
true juicer bills.
- Proposals
to lower the legal blood alcohol content while driving always
solicits millions from the alcoholic beverage industry.
- Proposals
to "tax the wealthy" more heavily and "make them
pay their fare share" are classic examples of fetcher legislation.
In every case,
once a sufficient amount of cash has been "extracted"
from the threatened individuals, groups, and corporations, the menacing
legislation is dropped. It is no different, in other words, from
the underworld thugs who demand bribes in return for allowing a
business to exist in "their" neighborhood, as portrayed
in every movie about organized crime that has ever been made. Justice
would require that several hundred members of the U.S. Congress
(and the administration) be treated in exactly the same way that
the governor of Illinois is being treated.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Lysander Spooner (19 January 1808 – 14 May 1887) was a libertarian, individualist anarchist, entrepreneur, political philosopher, abolitionist, supporter of the labor movement, and legal theorist of the 19th century. He is also known for competing with the U.S. Post Office with his American Letter Mail Company, which was forced out of business by the United States government. He believed that the price of borrowing capital could be brought down by competition of lenders if the government de-regulated banking and money. This he believed would stimulate entrepreneurship.
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