David Boaz

You can't. And the federal government knows it. On Tuesday,

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, told a House subcommittee that the government's experiences in the reconstruction of Iraq, hurricane-relief programs and the 1990s savings-and-loan bailout suggest the rescue program could be ripe for fraud.... Gene Dodaro, acting comptroller general of the U.S., told the subcommittee that a reliance on contractors and a lack of written policies could "increase the risk of wasted government dollars without adequate oversight of contractor performance."

With the government having already allocated $700 billion for TARP, and $787 billion for "stimulus," and President Obama now calling for $635 billion for health care and a federal budget soaring to $3.6 trillion -- well, you'd think two government reports on the likelihood of fraud and waste would be news. But this testimony didn't make the New York Times or the Washington Post. There was a small inside story in the Wall Street Journal. One of Greg Mankiw’s readers worked on the new Department of Homeland Security and reported recently:

you cannot juice up a government agency’s budget by tens of billions (or in the case of the stimulus package, hundreds of billions) and expect them to be able to process the paperwork to contract it out, much less oversee the projects or even choose them with any kind of hope for success. It’s like trying to feed a Pomeranian a 25 lb turkey. It’s madness. It was years before DHS got the situation under control and between the start and when they finally assembled a sufficiently capable team of lawyers, contracting officials, technical experts and resource managers, most of the money was totally wasted.

Linda Bilmes, coauthor with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, analyzes the massive problems in three somewhat smaller government projects — the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, and the Big Dig artery construction in Boston — and finds that “in any organization that starts to increase spending very rapidly there are risks of waste, fraud and inefficiency.” Saying "nobody messes with Joe" is not a solution to the inevitability of waste and fraud when an unaccountable bureaucracy is spending trillions of other people's dollars.

Vice President Biden is the latest member of the Obama administration to declare the administration's intent to use shock and awe to ram through their statist agenda in a crisis atmosphere:

"Opportunity presents itself in the middle of a crisis," Biden said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

HT: Johan Norberg, the author of a devastating critique of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. The Bush administration used crisis tactics, too, of course, ramming through the Patriot Act, the nationalization of airport security personnel, the creation of the Homeland Security Department, and the war in Iraq after the shock of 9/11 and a bevy of bailouts during the economic crisis. As Steve Horwitz wrote:

Just as the Patriot Act was a bunch of laws waiting for a political "crisis," so is much of the stimulus package a bunch of programs waiting for an economic "crisis." 

Plenty of earlier administrations used the same tactics, from FDR's first hundred days of frenetic legislation to LBJ's forced march to the Great Society after the Kennedy assassination. The difference is, the Obama administration is the first one to publicly and proudly proclaim that they intend to use the crisis atmosphere to force through an agenda that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

The Bush administration was good to lobbyists, especially in its final year, when lobbyists earned $3.2 billion, the most ever. But the Obama administration promises to be even better, according to those who follow the field. Marketplace Radio reports:

Washington lobbyists earned a whopping $3.2 billion last year. That's the highest amount in the decade tracked by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Executive Director Sheila Krumholz says interest groups spent $17.4 million on lobbying every day Congress was in session last year. And with Washington on a spending spree, companies are boosting their influence on Capitol Hill. SHEILA KRUMHOLZ: There was this unique opportunity that government was handing out money and anytime that happens, companies will spend what they must to get in line to get a piece of the pie. And that's expected to continue. Craig Holman is a governmental affairs lobbyist with the non-profit group Public Citizen. CRAIG HOLMAN: The amount spent on lobbying is not related to the disclosure or the regulation of the lobbying profession. It is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy.

That's right. Even the Naderite Public Citizen understands that "the amount spent on lobbying . . . is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy." Marketplace's Ronni Radbill goes on, "In other words, the more active the government, the more the private sector will spend to have its say.... With the White House injecting billions of dollars into the economy, lobbyists say interest groups are paying a lot more attention to Washington than they have in a very long time." Or, as F. A. Hayek explained the process 65 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: "As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power." And just who is doing all this lobbying? The Center for Responsive Politics says that health and pharmaceutical companies were the biggest spenders, which wouldn't surprise lobby-watcher Tim Carney, followed by the finance, insurance, and real estate industry (even though many of those companies cut back their lobbying late in the year, after getting the moolah they came for). But, Marketplace also reports, "There's a report out today from the Center for Public Integrity that says the number of green lobbyists has tripled in the last five years. There are nearly 2,500 people now employed trying to get their clients views heard on climate policy. Wall Street in particular sank a lot money into green." With the economy slowing, banks were pulling back from investments in so-called renewable energy. "That is, until the stimulus package tossed it a lifeline." So the $3.2 billion bonanza for lobbyists in 2008 was just a precursor of the lollapalooza to come. Within three weeks of Obama's inauguration, the Washington Post reported that more than 90 organizations had hired lobbyists specifically to influence the stimulus bill. Since President Obama has made clear that in his "blueprint for America," the $800 billion stimulus bill is just the start of his money flow to and from Washington, we can expect lobbying expenditures to keep on rising. Federal spending will be directed by politicians to politically favored recipients. That's just reality. If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then all this spending may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we're taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers. That's not a recipe for recovery. I'll give the last word again to Craig Holman of Public Citizen: "the amount spent on lobbying . . . is related entirely to how much the federal government intervenes in the private economy."

On this day in 1913, 96 years ago, the secretary of state notified Congress that the Sixteenth Amendment had been ratified and it was free to start taxing incomes directly. Some would say it's all been downhill since then. Frank Chodorov called it "the root of all evil":

The Sixteenth Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so that he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience.

Certainly the income tax makes possible the massive federal government that we have today. Without the ability to collect taxes directly from individuals -- and through the veil of paycheck withholding -- government could never hope to pay for troops in 135 countries, the retirement income of tens of millions of Americans, a vast army of federal employees, and all the other hallmarks of the modern state. The very first issue of the Cato Journal looked at the income tax, including essays by Arthur Ekirch and John Buenker on its origins and by Ronald Hamowy on civil liberties and the IRS. In later issues Charlotte Twight looked at withholding, and Bruce Bartlett examined how the income tax helped to bring down the Roman republic.

President Obama made good on his reputation for giving excellent speeches. He seemed calm and confident. It’s no wonder that instant polls show that most viewers liked it. That reaction is all part of the guiding strategy of this administration: using a crisis atmosphere to amass more money and power in Washington. There’s a long history of government growth in times of crisis such as wars, natural disasters, or economic shocks. Think of FDR’s revolutionary “first 100 days” or LBJ’s driving through his Great Society programs in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. George W. Bush did it, too, with both the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq after the shock of 9/11. And in so doing, he left his successor both a presidency and a federal government with unprecedented powers, ready to be employed for a different agenda. The difference between the Bush and Obama administration is that the latter openly proclaims its use of the “shock doctrine.” As Rahm Emanuel says, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” And that’s the strategy behind the sweeping agenda that President Obama laid out. The president called his budget “a blueprint for our future,” and as my colleague John Samples notes, “A blueprint is a plan for the society as a whole just as a real blueprint is a plan for a building…. [This is] a plan for the remaking of America. The metaphor reveals a habit of mind at odds with a free society.” Obama promised that the federal government would impose comprehensive redesigns on energy, health care, and education. But the success of America has always been rooted in individual enterprise and free markets. Obama blames free markets for our problems, when it was cheap money from the Fed and misguided federal incentives that caused the mortgage debacle. Voters respond enthusiastically to determined leadership at the moment of crisis. But laws made in a crisis atmosphere, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to Nixon’s wage and price controls to the TARP legislation, usually turn out badly. Democrats want to use this crisis to ram through government takeovers that they couldn’t achieve in any other period. We should slow down, take a deep breath, and carefully consider whether we want a clumsy, always-behind-the-times bureaucracy to take charge of our health, our access to energy, and our educational future. [ Cross-posted from The Hill’s Congress Blog ]

Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins often has sensible things to say. And in today's paper she makes some interesting points about hyper-competitiveness in sports and finance. But I think she was led astray by investor, college athlete, and Clinton Treasury appointee Roger Altman:

There is a strong natural connection between Wall Street and sports because "both are quite binary worlds, somebody wins and somebody loses," according to Altman, who was a varsity lacrosse player at Georgetown.

That's just wrong. In sports it's true: somebody wins and somebody loses. If the Yankees beat the Red Sox, that's a binary outcome with a winner and a loser. It's what economists call a zero-sum game. If Michael Phelps wins the gold, then everybody else doesn't. But in the market both parties to a transaction expect to gain. I get a meal, the restaurant owner gets my money. I get a salary, Cato gets my production. As Murray Rothbard wrote in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

The mercantilists argued that in any trade, one party can benefit only at the expense of the other—that in every transaction there is a winner and a loser, an “exploiter” and an “exploited.” We can immediately see the fallacy in this still-popular viewpoint: the willingness and even eagerness to trade means that both parties benefit. In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a “positive-sum” rather than a “zero-sum” or “negative-sum” game.

No doubt businessmen do like to "win" -- sometimes they say "money is a way of keeping score." They like to make the deal and block their competitors. Sometimes their testosterone may even impel them to make deals that aren't economically rational, and the market has a way of punishing such decisions. But the people who make the deals -- both parties, all parties -- all expect to benefit. And usually they're right. We've all bought things that we wish we hadn't, or made investments that didn't pan out. Most of the time, though, both parties to a transaction are pleased to make it and remain pleased after the fact. And the process of repeated positive-sum transactions creates economic growth and development. Sports is different. The game may be fun, for both competitors and spectators. But in the end, as Altman correctly says, in sports "somebody wins and somebody loses."

President Obama's proposal to tax the thrifty to bail out those who contracted for more house than they could afford -- and hearing people on the radio say "I scrimped and saved to buy a house I could afford, and now I'm going to pay for people who overextended themselves?" -- somehow got me to thinking of the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper:

In a field one summer’s day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest. “Why not come and chat with me,” said the Grasshopper, “instead of toiling and moiling in that way?” “I am helping to lay up food for the winter,” said the Ant, “and recommend you to do the same.” “Why bother about winter?” said the Grasshopper; “we have got plenty of food at present.” But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil. When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food, and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew: IT IS BEST TO PREPARE FOR THE DAYS OF NECESSITY.

Unless, of course, you can count on a government bailout.

While assaults on economic liberty from the Bush-Obama administration continue in Washington, the Institute for Justice is taking on another fight for the right to earn a living, this time in Boston. Erroll Tyler wants to use state-of-the-art amphibious vehicles to pick up and drop off passengers in Kendall Square in Cambridge and tour historical sites along a fixed route in Boston and Cambridge. But the city won't issue him a sightseeing license, ostensibly because of a moratorium on such licenses instituted because of the disruptive Big Dig project -- which finally ended six years ago. Ironically, one of the sights Tyler would like to show to visitors is the USS Constitution. The Institute for Justice has come to his aid, with a lawsuit in federal court and this video, featuring Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett, author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Boston Globe asks, "What does it say about the climate for small businesses in Boston and Cambridge that a guy with a promising business plan needs to turn to out-of-state libertarians to protect his interests in federal court?" One might also ask what it says about the liberals and conservatives in Massachusetts. Don't they want to help entrepreneurs?

Tim Carney has more details on some companies that hired lobbyists specifically to get a piece of the kitchen-sink spending bill:

For example, the National Association of Home Builders hired Baker & Hostetler a week after Barack Obama’s inauguration to lobby explicitly on the stimulus bill, which, in the end, included an $8,000 credit for home purchases. Better Place Inc. is an electric car company that hired its first lobbyist — Steve McBee, a former staffer for House appropriator Norm Dicks, D-Wash. — to push for electric car incentives in the stimulus. The resulting cornucopia included an expanded tax credit for plug-in cars, $2 billion in funding for electric car batteries and $400 million to build an electric car infrastructure, complete with recharging stations. Media giant Time Warner added to its lobbying army, hiring the firm Parven Pomper Strategies to lobby for broadband subsidies in the bill. These subsidies included $2.5 billion to underwrite loans to get broadband out to rural areas and an additional $4.7 billion in spending on other broadband projects. Similarly, network giant Cisco Systems lobbied for the broadband subsidies in H.R. 1.

Carney calls it "The Lobbyist Enrichment Act." I wrote about "Obama's K Street Recovery Plan" a couple of days ago.

Not that it needed it -- lobbying was one industry that kept on growing during 2008 -- the Washington influence business is getting a boost from the Obama-Pelosi-Reid massive spending bill. In a graphic on page A6 of the February 13 edition, not available online, the Washington Post reports that "A Washington Post analysis found that more than 90 organizations hired lobbyists to specifically influence provisions of the massive stimulus bill." The graphic shows that the number of newly registered lobbying clients peaked on the day after Obama's inauguration and continued to grow as the bill worked its way through both houses of Congress. In the accompanying article, the Post notes that -- unsurprisingly -- the $800 billion spending bill "is not free of spending that benefits specific communities, industries or groups, despite vows by President Obama that the legislation would be kept clear of pet projects." My favorite, as I've noted before, is

a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Here are some other recent headlines from the political class's newspaper of record: "THE INFLUENCE GAME: Lobbyists work stimulus to end"; "A Lobbying Frenzy For Federal Funds"; "Ohioans Seek Slice of Stimulus Pie"; "Lobbyists Get Around Obama's Earmark Ban"; "Certain Firms, Industries Got Last-Minute Gifts in Stimulus." More on the frenzied efforts to get a piece of the taxpayers' money in the spending bill here and here. If you want money flowing to the companies with good lobbyists and powerful congressmen, then the stimulus bill may accomplish something. But we should all recognize that we're taking money out of the competitive, individually directed part of society and turning it over to the politically controlled sector. Politicians rather than consumers will pick winners and losers. That's not a recipe for recovery.