Suckers!

Washington's parasite class keeps growing and growing and growing and...

Jonathan Rauch from the May 1994 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Openness--to new technology and to new competition, foreign and domestic--turns out to be a good inoculation against the worst economic depredations of lobbying, because it batters entrenched interests. By definition, what lobbies want is a permanent hold on their benefits. That is, they seek monopoly control of some piece of the private market (through trade protection, for instance, or favorable regulations) or some piece of the public treasury (through subsidies or tax breaks). Once they've got their goodies, they go to great lengths to defend them--which is why heavily protected and subsidized industries, such as shipping, textiles, and agriculture, usually spend much more on lobbying than do less-protected ones, such as semiconductors and software. The converse is also true. Squeeze a lobby's monopoly, and you crimp its lifeline.

So the way to weaken the public-school employees' lobby--one of the most deeply entrenched and reactionary groups in American politics today--is by freeing tax money for pub-lic schools' competitors. The way to weaken the farm lobby is to reduce agricultural subsidies. The way to weaken entrenched textile lobbies is to tear down their protective trade walls. The way to weaken cable- television lobbies and phone- company lobbies is to get rid of rules preventing the two industries from competing with each other, as the Clinton administration proposes to do. In short, the way to weaken coddled interests is to expose them to competition.

The rub is that exposure to competition is exactly what lobbies organize to avoid. Public-school teachers, farmers, textile companies, and the rest fight tooth and nail to keep every perk and goody they have ever acquired. They win more often than not, and even when they lose they rarely stay down for long. After 33 years, Congress finally managed last year to kill the honey subsidy, but the beekeepers' lobby bounced right back with a campaign for new trade restrictions on imported honey.

So we shouldn't kid ourselves. Crimping the transfer-seeking sector isn't easy. In fact, it is very difficult. It will require much more of the kind of innovative and forceful political leadership that produced the deregulation of transportation industries in the late 1970s, the subsidy-smashing tax-reform bill in 1986, and the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. Harder still, it will require the voters to support politicians who attack subsidies and protections that the voters themselves, speaking through their myriad groups, so fiercely protect.

To date, brave leadership and enlightened followership have both been scarce and sporadic. But we can hope that, as the parasite economy feeds and grows, the public will see more clearly why strong medicine is worth taking: The alternative is worse.