Democracy & Technology Blog Gilder on Earmarks
Our colleague George Gilder yesterday in The Wall Street Journal explained the real source of egregious earmarks:
How McCain-Feingold Favors ‘Earmarking’
January 26, 2006; Page A11
Your Jan. 17 editorial “The Keepers of K Street” ignored the most crucial source of “earmarks” in the congressional process — a campaign finance system that favors the bribery of interest groups over the contributions of citizens. Under McCain-Feingold, a citizen with diverse interests in the future of the nation is permitted to contribute $2,000. A political action committee representing a single interest group is permitted essentially unlimited contributions.
In other words, a PAC is a monomaniac with a single legislative goal. Until ordinary taxpayers with diverse interests and common sense — perhaps kids in school, a stake in the Iraq war, a direct grasp of the counterproductive effects of the tax code — are allowed to contribute as much as a governmental union or Archer Daniels Midland, earmarks will flourish regardless of budgetary reforms, which usually end up as obstacles to cuts in tax rates.
Congress has ears on both sides. You cannot end special interest politics by removing the earmarked spending unless you also remove the McCain-Feingold system favoring earmarked contributions.
George Gilder
Senior Fellow
Discovery Institute
Seattle
Forcing politicians to scrounge for tens of thousands of small contributions does not democratize the campaign finance system as the conventional wisdom has it. It makes fundraising the central thing politicians do and thus leads them inexorably to the professional fundraisers who can bundle elite special interest money for special projects far easier than they can bundle individual citizen money for support of a general government philosophy. McCain-Feingold centralizes the power of incumbents and lobbyists. Unlimited campaign contributions would make political money abundant so that politicians could ignore gifts from suspect or narrowly focused sources, thus freeing them from money’s hold.
-Bret Swanson
UPDATE: Dan Henninger of the Journal today picks up the same theme — how “good government” regulations yield bad government:
“In 1974 — the start the Long Era of Chaos in our politics — Congress claimed it was curing the abuses of Watergate by mandating that no individual could contribute more than $1,000 to a candidate per election. So of course candidates were going to need a lot of “individual” contributions to finance a modern campaign. Thus was born the current co-dependency between members of Congress who hold the power to confer federal spending and Washington lobbyists who have the power to bundle campaign contributions in PACs and such for incumbent earmarkers.
“A friend who was part of this world back then described it for me recently: ‘If you lived in Washington in those years, the change was dramatic. We moved to California in 1973. Returning to visit in 1976, the evening landscape had changed completely. There were fundraisers everywhere. Friends who were Congressmen were stopping at two or three cocktail parties an evening, touching base with single-subject organizations who had established PACs in reply to the 1974 reforms. We knew a caterer; her life had changed.’ Her business today is probably a publicly traded company….”