Ants at a Picnic

Cato‘s David Boaz writes Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue in The Cato Policy Report for Jan/ Feb 2012

Excerpt:

The libertarian argument for keeping more of society in the private sector is not that there’s no self-interest or corruption in business; it is that the market system has more competition, more checks and balances, and more incentives to satisfy customers. You can make money in the private sector by cutting costs; government agencies that cut costs find their appropriations reduced. Businesses must constantly search for better ways to deliver goods and services lest customers move to their competitors. Government agencies are usually monopolies that forbid competition. With no owners seeking a profit on their investment, no financial reward for doing a good job, no penalty for wasting money, government employees have little incentive to deliver goods and services efficiently.

As Adam Smith suggested with his “invisible hand” metaphor, the competitive market system channels self-interest in a socially beneficial way — into the search for ways to attract customers — while the non-market system actually encourages pure self-interest. And one aspect of that is lobbying. Big government means big lobbying. When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. And today’s federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.

Lobbyists love spending bills. They also love a complicated tax system with myriad rates and exemptions. And they especially love complex regulations, which generate demand for consultants who can navigate the regulatory agencies. Just look at some of the lobbying stories from 2011: “Desperate to Stop AT&T [in Washington, not in the hearts and minds of consumers], Sprint Doubles Lobbying Spend.” “Google, facing an antitrust probe by federal authorities, boosted its lobbying expenditures.” “Goldman Sachs flexes its lobbying muscle.”

As Craig Holman of Public Citizen, an organization founded by Ralph Nader, told Marketplace Radio after a report on rising lobbying expenditures during the financial crisis, “the amount spent on lobbying … is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.”

HKO

Lobbying is a by-product of regulation, yet the same people who decry lobbying the most are often the biggest pushers of new regulations.  Political self interest is often more corrupting than economic self interest because they substitute the force of government rule for the force of market discipline.  When wealth is sought from government connections rather than market service the economy becomes stagnant