RALEIGH – What would you do if you served on the board of directors of a troubled business that lost considerable revenue every year to shoplifting or embezzlement?
One possible response would be to study the finances and security systems of other companies with which you did business or against which you competed for sales, workers, and capital. If you hired your own shoplifters or sent in covert agents to embezzle their funds, you might be able to replace some of your own lost revenue while improving your competitive position.
Maybe. Plus, you know, it would be wrong.
Another response to your losses would be to beef up your own security. You could do a better job of screening potential customers and employees. You could work with other victimized businesses to seek improvements in lighting, police protection, and law enforcement to reduce predatory behavior against everyone. In the meantime, you could expand your own security systems and personnel to protect your assets.
Faced with the problem of theft, then, you could either hire thieves to refill your treasury or hire guards to keep it from being raided in the first place.
I’m for hiring guards. That’s why I vote against any government official who tries to win my support by promising to secure more government funding for my neighborhood or district. When someone makes the argument that longtime incumbency will benefit me by improving the seniority of my representative or senator, I hear an argument that if I keep my thief on the job long enough, he’ll get better at it.
It doesn’t persuade me.
What I’d rather hear from my current or prospective representatives is that they will vote against any net increase in the size and cost of government, that they will work with others to accomplish a reduction in the size and cost of government as soon as possible, and that in the meantime they will vote against any new program to be financed with higher taxes or borrowing, no matter how confident they are that they’ll be able to abscond with more than a proportional share of the goodies.
This is not simply a philosophical position I take. It is empirical. As I observed a couple of years ago about politicians who boast about the benefits of their seniority:
Keep me in the capitol and I’ll get you stuff” is a self-serving and appalling pitch. So are late-night TV ads for chat lines, bodily enhancements, and guaranteed systems to make a killing on real estate with no money down. There is a key difference, though. Most viewers have sense enough not to believe that calling 976-BABE will actually put you on the phone with the willowy Miss Tawny reclining by the pool, or that ordering an upsized bottle of upsized pills will, uh, up your size, or that anyone brilliant enough to work out an unbeatable real-estate scheme would be stupid enough to market it to the entire public for $50 a pop.
But many viewers do appear to buy the line that they ought to vote to retain incumbents with whom they disagree so as to maximize the political clout of their district or state. These voters are horribly misguided.
While government spending is a significant – way too significant! – share of the economy, it isn’t predominant. Few jurisdictions have ever made themselves wealthy by securing government grants and facilities.
…[E]ven in the few districts that have a track record of scamming large lumps of fiscal largesse by reelecting their doddering incumbents for many decades in a row, the practical benefits turn out to be scant. Defenders of the seniority argument point to West Virginia, which has attracted a disproportionate amount of federal funds and installations. Well, what’s been the result? West Virginia remains one of the poorest states in the country, and is gaining population at a slower rate than most. West Virginians would gain far more from better overall federal governance than they ever would from the current system, which combines what is still a relatively small flow of federal cash from Washington with a much-larger stream of a fouler-smelling liquid.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.