One of the advantages of living in Washington, DC is that a lot of interesting people pass through this town. And thanks to the sheer number of organizations and events that this town attracts if you keep your eyes open you can see some of these interesting people in person. So when a few nights ago I noticed that Jack Abramoff was going to be speaking at the National Press Club, for the price of going to the movies Sister Babe and I got to hear a talk from one of the most fascinating criminals of modern times.
The subject of the talk was Campaign Finance Reform, and who more qualified to talk on the subject than the man who embodied the art of buying and selling our elected leaders for fun and profit? The group whom Abramoff is now affiliated with is The Corporate Reform Coalition, a group whose mission is to pass new legislation to limit campaign finance contributions from businesses in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against Citizen’s United. The room was represented by an assortment of supporters. Apparently the coalition includes labor unions, educators, and environmentalists, or as a leftist would view them, the “good” kind of lobbyists.
Abramoff told some good stories about what he did to corrupt our political process, and his cohorts chimed in with a few points of their own. The solutions were nothing surprising, regulate the amounts of money coming in, restrict the actions of former politicos, etc. Although there was some pieces of balance to it (one of the panelists gave a surprisingly accurate of representation of Tea Party philosophy), most of the talk focused on how Big Business is to blame for our current woes, while naturally ignoring Big Labor, Big Green, Big Education, the various members of the NGO-Nonprofit Industrial Complex and any other leftist groups whose lobbying money wreaks havoc from their side of the aisle.
Like any good lecture with a prominent figure, there was a Q&A session afterward. It wasn’t pretty. The questions were mainly nasty and accusatory ones thrown out by journalists whose motivation seemed to be hoping to catch Abramoff in some “gotcha” moment and make a name for themselves. One of the pressies managed to monopolize a few minutes with about four follow up questions until she was finally told to surrender the microphone during the ensuing answer. Another one had five pages of a scribbled manifesto that he read off until finally getting to his three questions at the end. On a side note, we almost made Abramoff bust out laughing during this guy’s screed. By the third page turn of this guy’s rant I was starting to have trouble keeping myself from cracking up, which of course started to have the same effect on Sister Babe. The Ranting Dude was standing directly between us and Abramoff, leaving us straight in his line of sight. According to Sister Babe apparently Abramoff could see us and looked like he was biting back a smile as this guy ranted and ripped on him. Not that I’m saying that Abramoff is some angel who should have been fawned over, but it would have been nice if the journalists there might have respected everyone else’s time or maybe asked some question whose purpose was to, as one great journalistic organization would say, lean forward.
Every question save for one (that asked how any bill could pass against the strength of Republican corruption) was someone wanting to dig into things that Abramoff did several years ago. So as you might have guessed, I did not get to pose my question. Had I been given the chance to speak, I was ready to ask Jack Abramoff, “How much are they paying you to say this?” Just kidding. Sister Babe made me promise to be nice, and that wasn’t the question that interested me. What I was going to ask would have gone something like this:
“Back in 2001 I attended a Campaign Finance Reform event hosted by Senators McCain and Feingold (No, I’m not that well connected – Back in 2000 I made a small contribution to McCain’s presidential campaign, which earned me a place on his mailing lists). We heard about how Campaign Finance Reform was the first necessary step before we could even hope to see any meaningful reform in Washington . Here we are eleven years later and calling on new legislation designed to curb all of the abuses we’ve seen over the last decade.
Whatever law gets written and happily signed by the president with bipartisan support, it is going to be written by lawmakers designed to restrict their predecessors and mentors, all of the people who helped them get into their current job, all of the businesses that funded their campaigns, not to mention curbing the career path that many of them have their sights on. There is no doubt in my mind that whatever language is in the final law that gets passed it will contain enough loopholes or vaguely worded rules to ensure that in 2023 we will be back here in this same room discussing why we need a new law to address the failures of the Abramoff Lobbying Reform Act of 2012. Can you please convince me that I am wrong?”
I would have loved to have heard his response. I can also almost guarantee that it would not have convinced me. The problem with efforts like these to control money in politics is that however well intentioned they may be they are looking at this from the wrong direction. Anyone who has been reading my “Economics for Politicians” series (Thank you, both of you! Lesson Nine is coming soon, I promise!) knows that businesses are greedy, which is not necessarily a bad thing. How do you get them to stop throwing so much money into politics? Easy – you make it less profitable. Think about it, in today’s business climate you are sitting on cash that you would like to use to invest in your business to expand and bring in more profit. You can:
Hire a new employee, which means also carrying in the expenses of Obamacare, threat of attacks by Big Labor, and whatever other surprises the various Big Anti-Prosperity groups might have aimed at you.
Invest in the business with capital or other ways to put your money to work for you. Now you have the specter of Dodd-Frank, or risk becoming too profitable, making you a target of the government for its “fair share” of the profits that resulted from the risk and hard work you put into earning it
You give money to a lobbyist to go out and buy you a politician who will pass legislation to regulate your industry to prevent new competitors from emerging, if not just funneling money directly to you in the interest of something like “Helping Acme Widgets to become an international leader in the growing global market of widget making while creating good jobs here in America!”
Which of these options carries the least risk while having the potentially highest return on your investment? That’s right, option C! Do you want less money flowing into Washington? Reduce what is flowing out of Washington . Get it out of our lives; start peeling back the insane amounts of regulation that’s been imposed and when that day comes it will be cheaper and more profitable to grow the business and hire new employees versus paying bribes. Only when this is achieved will we see the flow of all of that corrupting money flowing into our Capitol and State Houses finally slow down. It isn’t rocket science to understand, but making it actually happen makes rocket science look simple by comparison.
Crossposted from Brother Bobs Blog
I posted on another topic about people using “there ought to be a law” as reason for passing and instituting law. The McCain-Feingold campaign reform law was just such law. A “problem” had been identified, someone uttered that semi-famous phrase, and voila’, we get the MF Campaign finance reform law. The thing is, that “problem” they identified was not really the problem. No, it was just a symptom of a much bigger, more widespread problem.
What is that bigger, more widespread problem? You nailed it in your post, Brother Bob. There is too much money to be wrangled, finagled, legislated, legally thieved, or any other term one wants to use, out of DC. The clearest example of this, most recently anyway, is “green” technology handouts, and it’s poster child, as of now anyway, is Solyndra.
When it becomes easy to direct a portion of the money spigot from DC in your direction simply by giving money to a politician’s campaign(legal), or sending him on some high priced jaunt(illegal), then the logical question that follows is: If x amount of money given gets me y amount from the government, then does two times x get me two times y? And while the answer may not be an exact yes, one can certainly see that more and more money given to the pols equals more and more money to them from the government, or via government regulation.
This is one of the hazards of legislators in DC, the state government houses, and even the local government councils. That is, the influence of money on politics, starts with the politicians handing out the cash. And even legitimate reasons for that money flow from government can, and is, corrupted, by where that money is directed to. Money for roads, for example, may be handed over to the guy who has shady business practices and an inferior product, simply because he gave the most to the pols in charge of the purse strings, instead of the pols doing actual work and finding the guy with the best method and best product for making those roads.
To see this another way;
-The problem with McCain-Fiengold is that it sees the equation as Money in(to politicians) equals Money out(to political contributors).
-The reality is that the equation they used is backwards, and should read as Money out equals Money in.
And politicians who try to find everything under the sun, twisting the Constitution to read how they need it to read, perpetuate this series of money exchanges. Once a new tap is installed, the influence peddlers swoop in and try to buy their way into sole, or partial, ownership of it by handing out the cash to the pols.
@johngalt: Of all of the good points you just made the best one you made was probably completely accidental:
“MF Campaign finance reform law” – We may have found the perfect nickname!
BrotherBob – Well written piece and very interesting.
The question you wanted to pose was not only excellent, but it reminded me of a quote from the Federalist Papers: