Jay Cost’s new book is about political corruption.Not Watergate or blue-dress corruption...(*RUEFUL SMILE*)...but the kind that is often not illegal.* CONSTITUTIONAL MALFEASANCE... REFUSING TO HONOR ONE'S DUTY - ONE'S OATH...* BETRAYAL..."A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption" is “about corruption as a permanent, institutionalized feature of our government.” This has happened despite the fact that “our Founding Fathers were frankly concerned about corruption, so much so they designed a system to prevent it from occurring.”Cost knows politics, and his book is a chronicle of history and is honest about reality. We talk a bit about A Republic No More and its implications. — Kathryn Jean Lopez
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Kathryn Jean Lopez: How bad is corruption in America? So
much so that we are "A Republic No More?"
Jay Cost: I came to that conclusion as I wrote the book.
An unhappy one, no doubt. My original title was going to be The Violence of
Faction, taken from Madison’s Federalist
No. 10, but as I studied contemporary policy more and more, I realized
that the regular, accepted, established ways of doing business are just so
fundamentally contrary to the ideals of the Founding that something essential
has been lost.
Lopez: Corruption in America is “a permanent,
institutionalized feature of our government?" And yet your book is
explicitly not a rant against “a hopeless, immoral cesspool where everybody is
out for themselves and nobody does what is right, and the only thing to do is
await the cleansing hellfire unleashed by the Almighty.” What’s your practical
goal? How can this book lead to more clear thinking about politics and how
corruption happens and how things can be better?
Cost: My practical goal was to connect two dots — how the
growth of government leads to the growth of corruption. And not because we
elect bad people. The problem is that as government grows and expands beyond
the boundaries of the Constitution, our system’s capacity “to break and control
the violence of faction” (James Madison’s phrase) begins to erode. The
government just can’t help itself, regardless of whom we elect.
My hope is that this gets people thinking about our
institutions of government, not just the personalities who inhabit government
for a time. For instance, conservatives are very frustrated with congressional
Republicans. Many believe they have been betrayed. This book kind of shifts the
emphasis — maybe this is just the best anybody can do, given the rules of the
game in Washington. And if we want real reform, we have to start thinking about
those rules, rather than finding people we think can play them more
effectively.
BARKER: OR... PERHAPS THE RINOs REALLY ARE THE SCUMBAGS I
SEE THEM AS.
Lopez: What’s most misunderstood about corruption?
Cost: I think the biggest misunderstanding is that it has
only to do with law-breaking. Law-breaking certainly is corrupt, but there are
so many ways to be corrupt without breaking the law. For instance, suppose you
are a lobbyist and you give me $50,000, which I then put in my freezer, and
later on I make sure an appropriation worth $250 million to you gets passed
into law. If caught, I would go to jail.
But what if you contribute $2,000 to my campaign, your
PAC tosses in another $5,000, affiliated PACs and individuals kick in more to
get me to $50,000, which in turn goes to family members whom I employ as
campaign workers. You hire my good friend to work as your consultant. And when
you are looking to buy a piece of real estate in Georgetown, you use my nephew
as your broker. And then you offer me a seven-figure salary for a consulting
gig after I leave office. And I make sure an appropriation worth $250 million
to you gets passed into law. If I got caught... I would not go to jail. In
fact, I would probably get calls from my colleagues asking if I could fundraise
for them as well!
Which one is “corruption” and which is not? I think they
both are, but if we limit our understanding to law-breaking we’d say the first
was corrupt and the latter just fine. But the latter is just as bad.
BARKER: AGREED!
Lopez: What does Calvinism have to do with it?
Cost: Madison had a Calvinistic view of human nature. If
you read his essays in the Federalist, especially 10 and 51, you can see how
little he thought of mankind’s capacity for good behavior. That matters because
his question was: How do we get a bunch of selfish, potentially violent people
to coordinate for the public interest? He rejected the alternatives of public
education in virtue, civic religion promoting virtue, or a small city-state of
homogenous interests. He thought all of them would eventually fail because
human nature is so intractable. His solution was to use that nature against
itself — to have “ambition counteract ambition,” as he put it. Our Constitution
reflects that view.
BARKER: SEPARATION OF POWERS!
Lopez: What were our first big mistakes? And how did it
become habitual and institutionalized?
Cost: The argument of the book is that big government
breeds corruption because it grows the state’s power beyond the capacities of
its institutions to manage it. The Constitution was like a finely calibrated
Swiss watch. Powers were distributed across institutions — “checks and
balances” — to make sure that the selfish forces that enter the body politic
are checked by and balanced against one another. When we grow the power of
government beyond the original grant, we threaten to disrupt that balance
unless we think carefully about whether our institutions can handle the new
powers given to them.
BARKER: ABSOLUTELY!
It’s in that latter regard we’ve failed. Our first big
mistake happened early in our country’s history — with the First Bank of the United
States. This required an expansive reading of the Constitution without much due
consideration for whether the new power could responsibly be exercised by the
institutions the Constitution created. (While the Supreme Court eventually
upheld the First Bank, the Convention explicitly voted down a chartering
authority.)
The First Bank was pretty well run, but it set up the
precedent that has been followed again and again: Some new problem emerges,
federal authorities decide the powers of government should expand to meet the
new challenge, but... they do not pay attention to whether the existing
institutions can exercise the new powers responsibly. So often, our
institutions cannot. And that yields corruption.
BARKER: YEP!
Lopez: You focus on the maldistribution of federal
resources as corruption. How so? You also talk about the problems of government
expansion in various areas. Could this be a conservative/tea-party manifesto?
Cost: That was a choice I made to narrow the focus. I
couldn’t write about everything (e.g. corruption in the states). I think it
often parallels federal corruption, but it would make for too big and unwieldy
a story to make that point. And... the book was written from a conservative
perspective, although I think there are things liberals might appreciate (e.g.
I mostly catalog ways corruption favors the wealthy and thus engenders
inequality).
The hope was that this would provide conservatives with a
new argument against an ever-expansive state. Conservatives typically approach
the problem in the abstract — big government in general creates problems of
inefficiency/waste, encroachment on individual liberties, structural deficits,
etc. What I wanted to argue was that our government in particular creates
unique problems. Specifically, it yields corruption — in addition to those
general problems enumerated above.
Lopez: Is your book essentially a lesson in bad
stewardship? Are Americans bad stewards?
Cost: I think so, unfortunately. To be a good Madisonian
steward requires us to think hard about whether our institutions are well
designed. And that means thinking about whether they can handle the powers we
have given them. Collectively, that is something we have not really been
concerned about. Politicians advertise the growth of government as a tonic to
whatever ails us, and people again and again have consented — and all the
while, hardly anybody stops to think about whether our government as designed
can handle those responsibilities.
BARKER: IT'S NOT... AND IT WASN'T!
Lopez: What’s so violent about factions? And what do we
do if that’s often the lifeblood of politics? (Isn’t that a main theme of your
first book?)
Cost: That is the conundrum at the heart of republican
ideology — Madison called the remedy (whatever it may be) “the great
desideratum in government.” Human beings are self-interested, prone to
factions, and inclined to take what they can get even at the expense of
somebody else.
BARKER: YEP! BACK TO HUMAN NATURE!
Cost: So, how do you get a nation, composed of such
miserable creatures, to coordinate on behalf of everybody? Madison’s solution
was: good institutions.
And... factions literally can be violent.
Madison saw that in his own day. Creditor-debtor disputes
had literally flared into open rebellion in Massachusetts (Shays’ Rebellion),
and there were fears that it would spread throughout the rest of the nation.
Madison thought that a lack of good institutions is what pitted these factions
against each other in ways that created such violence. A well-designed
government could channel them to constructive ends.
Lopez: Why do you point out early that the book is not “a
tale of heroes and villains”?
Cost: There was never a time when corruption was not a
feature of the body politic.
BARKER: AGREED...
Cost: And in most eras, practices that in other ages
would be (rightly) identified as corrupt were simply accepted as the way
political transactions should be handled. That tells me it really does not
matter whether we have a lot of good people running the government, or bad
people ruining it. It gets down to the rules of the game. That, to me, is the
essential question. A very Madisonian one, at that.
BARKER: I FIND MYSELF DISAGREEING - AT LEAST IN TERMS OF
ABSOLUTES. TRULY GOOD PEOPLE IN POSITIONS OF POWER CAN WORK WONDERS. LOOK AT
COOLIDGE! LOOK AT REAGAN! HECK... FOR ALL HIS PERSONAL FAILINGS LOOK AT
GINGRICH AND WHAT HE WAS ABLE TO ACCOMPLISH IN COMPARISON TO THE LILLIPUTIANS WHO
CAN BEFORE AND AFTER HIM!
Lopez: You point to Madison for solutions. How can he
help us?
Cost: Madison was writing in a pre-industrial age, facing
different dilemmas and challenges, and the range of solutions open to him was
quite different than what we have. Still, there is a timelessness to his
philosophy because he was dealing with the problems that human nature poses for
a well-governed body politic.
Lopez: How far have we strayed from the Founders? Does
the straying suggest they could have thought this out better?
Cost: The Constitution was a political compromise
hammered in a moment of crisis. Society was coming apart at the seams in 1787,
and the existing authority (the Continental Congress under the Articles of
Confederation) no longer enjoyed the confidence of the people. Moreover, this
was a pre-industrial era, and a country that was fragmented, disconnected, and
hardly even a nation as we today understand it. The Constitution was meant to
work for that place... in that moment.
What this means is that we cannot go back to the
Constitution as it was understood. It makes for a good talking point, but it is
simply impractical.
BARKER: AGAIN... I DISAGREE. (AT LEAST IN THAT I'D NEED
TO ADDRESS SPECIFICS ONE AT A TIME AND ONLY THEN COULD I COMMENT FURTHER.)
We have strayed in the following way. Society evolved and
changed, facing new problems and challenges. When the Framers came together,
they debated for months on end figuring out how to expand governing authority
in responsible ways — respectful of individual liberty, mindful of the inherent
limits of governing power, and fearful of the ways that power may be abused. How
did subsequent generations respond? Very differently.
Look at the New Deal and the Great Society. They were
hodge-podge, shambolic pieces of government activity that massively expanded
federal authority and yet were implemented without due regard for those bigger
questions. Usually, the priority was simply to acquire enough votes in Congress
while the president’s job approval rating was still high. And while those are
extreme examples of our history, the general pattern holds: Whereas the Framers
were careful and considered in designing the original charter, we have been
careless and hasty in redesigning it.
BARKER: THUS... WE MUST RETURN TO
"RESPONSIBILITY." (I'M NOT SAYING THIS WOULD BE EASY; I AM SAYING I
BELIEVE IT COULD BE DONE; I DO BELIEVE "RESPONSIBILITY" MUST BE RE-TRIED!)
Lopez: Even as you don’t do villains and heroes, who
comes closest in each category?
Cost: A hero is certainly George Washington. He was as
close to the constitutional ideal of a president as we have ever come. He was
impartial in executive appointments. He was judicious in considering the proper
course for public policy. And he walked away from the job in 1797, creating an
important precedent that helped keep a lid on overbearing executive authority
for another century.
A villain would probably be Andrew Jackson. I have never
seen another leader so thoroughly and completely mistake his own prejudices for
the national interest, which is really saying something because that is a
common error many leaders make. But that is not all. The real danger with
Jackson was that he pursued those prejudices with total commitment, regardless
of what the law said or what the effect on the national good might be. That
made him a hypocrite, and a dangerous one at that. He threatened the South
Carolina Nullifers but then looked the other way as Georgia violated a treaty
the Cherokee had with the feds. He railed against the partiality of the Second
Bank of the United States, but after he took federal deposits from it he
distributed them to “pet” banks that were loyal to him. And in so doing, he
kept the United States from having anything approaching a sensible monetary
policy until Salmon Chase became treasury secretary in the 1860s.
BARKER: MODERN SENSIBILITIES... I TEND TO HAVE FAR MORE
RESPECT FOR JACKSON. (OF COURSE EVEN BY WRITING THIS I OPEN MYSELF UP TO
INEVITABLE ATTACK...)
Lopez: Who can we most learn from through your lens on
Jacksonian America, the Gilded Age, and so many other big moments in
corruption?
Cost: The reformers of the 19th century have the most to
teach us. There was always corruption in that era, and it did get worse as the
century moved on, but there was almost always a vibrant reform movement putting
pressure on the status quo. Some of them were on what we today would think of as
the Left; others on the Right. Some had great ideas; others had terrible ones.
Most of the time they were unsuccessful. But they were always there, doing the
hard work of speaking truth to power, and coming up with (occasionally) good
ideas on how to fix things. And then — almost in the blink of an eye — they
would have a brief moment to reform the system. They took their shot, and they
succeeded.
This is how the patronage regime of the Gilded Age was
destroyed. As late as 1880 it looked insuperable, and yet the assassination of
James Garfield in 1881 gave the reformers an opening, and they managed to get a
good reform law passed.
We have to have the same approach. We have to do our
homework, hammering out sensible reform measures. We have to keep pressure on
the status quo, reminding them that we are here and trying our best to keep
them in line. We have to build alliances with the other side when and as we are
able, never sacrificing our core values. And then we have to be patient, wait
for our opening, and take the shot when we have it.
Lopez: What does Medicare have to do with it?
Cost: Medicare is a great illustration of how we cannot
understand corruption if we think of it merely as heroes vs. villains.
Everybody involved in Medicare is by and large quite sympathetic — doctors,
nurses, hospitals, senior citizens, etc. But it is corrupt. Why? Not because
these are bad people, but because they are factions that the government cannot
manage responsibly. They are not the problem. The government is.
We talk about “waste, fraud, and abuse” of the Medicare
system, as if this money just disappears. But it does not. It flows
systematically to interest groups that lobby the government aggressively to
make sure the money is not well spent. And the problem is not with those groups
per se. They are doing exactly what anybody would be expected to do. The
government is providing them a benefit, they are working hard to protect and
extend it. Who can blame them?
BARKER: I CAN BLAME THEM! WE MUST ALL BLAME THEM! THE
DYSFUNCTION MUST BE REVERSED!
Cost: The problem is with the way the government manages,
or better put, mismanages those groups. Is it guiding them to an end that
serves the public interest, as Madison envisioned? No. It allows them to
dominate public policy for their own benefit, and the common good is sacrificed
along the way, in the form of tens of billions of dollars that are misspent
every year.
Lopez: What’s corrupt about the New Deal? How can that be
a constructive observation?
BARKER: PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING ABOUT THE NEW DEAL WAS
CORRUPT... BUT AMERICANS AREN'T TAUGHT THE TRUE HISTORY...
(*SIGH*)
Cost: The New Deal is still encircled by a host of FDR
hagiographers who have worked hard to defend it over the years. This is why
Amity Shlaes’s "The Forgotten Man" was so important, because it made
the very good point that a lot of New Deal policies were nonsensical and
counter-productive.
BARKER: YEP...
Cost: I extend that argument to make the point that the
New Deal also systematically benefited well-positioned interests in society.
For starters, all those works projects that liberals still celebrate? They were
used by congressional Democrats to secure their political positions. FDR used
them similarly — transforming them into patronage to support or destroy urban
political bosses based on whether they backed him in 1932. The New Deal also
suspended civil-service laws that had been in place for half a century by then,
giving Democrats another opportunity to ensconce themselves in government.
BARKER: HOW MANY OF YOU KNEW THAT - OF THE SUSPENSION OF
CIVIL SERVICE LAWS BY FDR?
Then the big social-welfare/regulatory programs — on farm
subsidies, industrial regulation, wages/hours — all of these were captured, to
varying degrees, by interest groups. Farm subsidies favored the wealthy
plantation gentry in the South, at the expense of poor, usually black
sharecroppers. And not because the gentry deserved it, but because they
dominated congressional agriculture committees.
BARKER: HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED AT IT THAT WAY, FOLKS?
Industrial regulations favored big businesses over small
business and consumers. The facts of the Supreme Court case that ultimately
brought down the National Industrial Recovery Act are really obscene. The
government was basically looking to ruin a small poultry business because it sold
a handful of “unfit” chickens. But that was life under the NIRA. And then even
social-welfare programs like Social Security and the minimum wage were
originally built to favor factions in Congress — the Southern agricultural
gentry and Northern manufacturing concerns, respectively. All of this is either
excluded or excused in the traditional story you read about the New Deal. But
when you add it all up, it is a really striking amount of favoritism and, yes,
corruption.
BARKER: YEP. WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW... WHAT YOU WERE NEVER
TAUGHT... (NOT TO MENTION ALL THE LIES... THE PROPAGANDA)... CAN, WILL, AND HAVE
HURT YOU, I, AND EVERY OTHER PERSON THE CONSTITUTION WAS MEANT TO PROTECT AND
DEFEND!
Lopez: Why should 2015 Americans care about things like
tariff laws governing sugar in the 1890s?
Cost: Well, for starters, it is just entertaining as
hell. I mean Chapter 5 of the book, where I deal most extensively with that,
was easily my favorite to write. The tariff laws bankrolled the late
19th-century political machines, and they were run by some colorful characters.
Boies Penrose alone is worth the price of admission. But beyond that I think
there is a lesson there about how public policy works. The tariff regime was
begun with the noblest of intentions. The point was to help develop the
national domestic economy and bring about broad-based prosperity. It took about
100 years, but it eventually devolved into a deeply unfair log-roll that helped
the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, and inhibited the nation’s
economic potential.
BARKER: ALLOW ME TO INTERJECT THAT I'M BASICALLY PRO-TARIFF.
(AND COST EXPLAINS MY FEELING VIA HIS NEXT STATEMENT!)
Cost: That is why it was replaced with the income tax...
BARKER: (*SMILING*)
Cost: ...which really did reform the system - at least
for a while. It took about 100 years, but it eventually devolved into a deeply
unfair logroll that helped the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, and
inhibited the nation’s economic potential!
BARKER: I LOOK FORWARD TO READING THE CHAPTER!
History has repeated itself when it comes to our tax
code. I think that says something very important about the way our government
functions, not just day to day, but generation to generation. It gets beyond
the personalities who are in government at a certain point in time and gets to
the institutions that guide and control their behavior.
Lopez: Is the most important audience for your book
policymakers?
Cost: Probably not. I certainly did not write it for
them. They are bound by the rules of the game, and I think those rules are
broken. The question becomes: How do we change them? If you look through the
pages of history, the answer almost always comes back: through outside
pressure. So the book is really written to the disinterested citizenry — the
people who pay attention to politics yet who do not draw a living from it. They
are deeply frustrated with the status quo, as am I. And the point of this book
is really to help explain my own frustrations, and hopefully theirs as well.
And the better we understand the nature of the problem, the better pressure we
can apply to the government.
Lopez: Can an aspiring presidential candidate and his
staff take this book and run with it?
Cost: Doubtful. The unfortunate reality is that the way
political campaigns are financed today is so fundamentally tilted toward
special-interest groups that the eventual nominee will be duty-bound to
misbehave, for lack of a better word.
BARKER: TO AN EXTENT... OBVIOUSLY... BUT TO AN EXTREME -
NOT NECESSARILY. I FEEL BOTH LIBERTARIANS AND TEA PARTY SUPPORTERS CAN AND
SHOULD RUN UNDER A "SAVE THE CONSTITUTION! SAVE THE REPUBLIC!" BANNER.
Lopez: Do you have a favorite to watch? Someone we’re not
watching whom we should encourage?
Cost: Our better point of emphasis is probably the
Congress. As Article I opens, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be
vested in a Congress of the United States.” Rather than think about the
sleeper, would-be presidential candidates, I think our time would be better
spent looking at which Republicans on the Financial Services Committee are
taking money from the big banks — because that will impact whether we can get
rid of “too big to fail.” Or how about which Republicans are in hock to the
insurance industry? A lot of them are, and the insurers are working like the
dickens to protect ObamaCare, they are working Republican members over, and we
might suddenly meet some resistance from our own on our “repeal and replace”
agenda if we win in 2016.
BARKER: DUH! THE DEMOCRATS... THE LEFT... THE RINO
OFFICEHOLDERS...
(*SHRUG*)
Put another way, when we focus relentlessly on the White
House, we miss so much misbehavior in Congress. Right now Congress seems
impotent because of Obama, but over the long run Congress is supremely
powerful. And we have to view its chronic misbehavior as our No. 1 problem.
BARKER: AND I DO! I LONG HAVE! STILL... ONLY AN HONORABLE
CONSTITUTIONIST PRESIDENT CAN "LEAD" ("PUSH") CONGRESS TO
DO WHAT MUST BE DONE!
That is not to say the presidential office is not
important. Of course it is. The point is that we tend to view the president as
the center of political life, when in fact Congress is.
BARKER: IN THE SENSE OF GOVERNMENT ON AUTO-PILOT... YES... FAIR
ENOUGH...
Lopez: What’s typically wrong with presidential-primary
season, and how can it be done better this time, even at this relatively late
date?
Cost: So many things are wrong with it. Bottom line, it
privileges minority factions within the party at the expense of the larger GOP
electorate. The Iowa caucuses favor a type of voter that does not represent the
broader party, especially in terms of priorities. And Iowa so often sets up the
debate moving forward.
Infinitely worse than this, though, is that the campaign
itself systematically favors the donor class and the consultant class. They
ultimately decide which candidates are deemed viable and which are not, which
means that their importance is wildly disproportionate to their numbers. And
their views, for instance on immigration, are often out of sync with the
broader GOP electorate, much more so than the average Iowa caucus-goer’s.
Unfortunately, I think nothing can be done. Jeffrey
Anderson and I worked our butts off to put together some solid reform ideas
back in 2013, when the rules for 2016 were still in flux. And the response we
got was a deafening silence. The grassroots did not seem too interested, and of
course the powers that be did not want to change things. The rules are now in
place. It is too late. The earliest date for meaningful reform must therefore
be 2020, and if a Republican wins in 2016 we will not see major changes to what
I think is a dysfunctional system until 2024.
BARKER: CALL ME AN OPTIMIST...
(*WINK*)
Lopez: Seriously, what’s ahead for America? How can 2016
be, to use an overused term in politics, an actual game changer in terms of
this corruption you cover in the book?
Cost: The status quo is a very powerful force in our
system. It exists for a reason, namely because a critical mass of important
groups/interests finds it preferable to any feasible alternative. We cannot
underestimate it.
Historically speaking, reform comes when the status quo
hits a breaking point, and groups that historically had been on the outside
looking in finally have a shot at reform. This explains civil-service reform in
the 1880s. But it also accounts for the progressive triumph of 1912/16, the New
Deal, and the Reagan revolution. Maybe the election of 2016 will be such a
moment, maybe it will not.
I wish I could say, “We need to do this, that, and the
other to make it become such a moment.” But really, it is just a matter of
patience because these things are governed by forces outside of any individual,
or group, or movement’s, control. What we need to do is the hard work of
putting together a reform agenda so that we are ready for when the status quo
breaks down. In that moment, our side might be given real power to remake the
body politic, and the question we’ll confront is: Are we ready? So that means
we need to think not only about how to fix education, health-care, and energy
policy, but how do we reform the system itself? We have to start thinking about
that.
We can’t think about how to make 2016 the next 1980, or
as if it is our version of 1932. That is totally beyond our control. What we
can do instead is make 2015 like 1978 was for conservatives, or like the 1920s
were for the liberals. Those years were not politically successful for the
sides in question, but they were also the times when they worked through their
ideas so that when their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity came, they could make
the most of it.
Lopez: One gets the sense that you love the mechanics of
politics. Why? What got that started? How does that continue, knowing what you
know about it?
Cost: Generally, my experience in graduate school was not
positive. Nevertheless, I took some fascinating classes on political economy,
game theory, rational choice, etc., that just gave me an enormous appreciation
for the rules of the game. I’ve always loved history — it really is my first
love — and when I combined rational-choice theory with history I came to
understand that the rules of the game evolve over time and are indeed
susceptible to influence by people who want to change them.
BARKER: I AM DEFINITELY GONNA READ THIS GUY'S BOOK!
There is an impulse to just take the rules as a given and
try to do our best with the rules as they are. But when you combine history and
rational-choice theory, you begin to see that (a) we should not take them as
given and (b) better rules yield better results. This is something that I think
Madison understood on a very deep level. And a few years ago I taught a course
on the Constitution for Robert Morris University here in Pittsburgh and really
read Madison's writings in the 1780s with care for the first time. And I just became
drawn not only to his insights, but also to his priorities. There were a bunch
of thinkers from the 18th century who began to understand the essentials of
rational-choice theory — Condorcet, Hume, Smith, etc. Madison was one of them
as well, and he took it to a level of practical application that was simply
unmatched in his day.
And... I am just overwhelmed by Madison’s brilliance.
This book reflects my efforts to work through the
problems that Madison presents us.
Lopez: How do we get to the work of the actual common
good when there seems to be no agreement on what that is?
Cost: This is a really great question. From a
philosophical perspective, it seems almost intractable. A thousand different
people will have a thousand different viewpoints on a thousand different
questions. And Madison’s primary commitment was to the process. Set up the
system properly, and the thousand different viewpoints will produce something
that will resemble the common interest.
But when we move from the philosophical to the practical,
it is not hard to see. The waste in farm subsidies is outrageous. The way
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac captured the regulatory process — again...
outrageous. The ways that political-economic policies of the Gilded Age screwed
the farmer, who by the way was still a majority of the work force — outrageous.
There are, of course, instances when the public interest is harder to divine —
but there are plenty of instances where it is as clear as day.
My book focuses on the latter, relentlessly — even to the
point that it may frustrate some conservatives.
I do not deal with ObamaCare because, frankly, I do not
yet know how that policy is going to play itself out. I have some strong
suspicions, and if you read my work at the Weekly Standard you know where I stand
on that question. But there remains a lot of uncertainty on ObamaCare, so
instead I focused on Medicare, where you have 50 years of history and some
pretty solid consensus on the ways and means interest groups get paid off.
Similarly, I avoid questions about monetary policy pretty
studiously, even though I know a lot of conservatives are frustrated by the
Federal Reserve’s policy in recent years. I am, too. I think there has been
mission creep at the Fed, maybe even regulatory capture, to the point that it
is basically propping up the S&P 500. I don’t like that. But those are
nebulous questions lacking certain answers. On Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
however, only the most diehard of partisans will deny that something was deeply
wrong.
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