RALEIGH – When confronted with the news that North Carolina businesses, trade associations, and nonprofit organizations spent a combined $22 million lobbying on state issues in 2007, you can react in one of three ways.
I’ll label the reactions not by rhetoric or arguments, but by hand gestures. (No, I don’t mean those kind of gestures – get your head out of the gutter!)
You could wring your hands in desperation, fretting for the future of the Republic. This pose has a long but not very venerable history. Human beings have (understandably) grumbled about big-money corruption in politics since politics was invented. Nowadays, many government staffers, journalists, and pundits complain loudly about the inordinate influence of special interests – by which they mean that politicians are listening to wrong special interests, rather than the huge bureaucracies and media establishments represented by the complainers themselves.
Another way to react to the news is more ominous: you can form your hand into a threatening fist. Some leftists and populists aren’t content to require some public disclosure of private expenditures in the political process. They want to further restrict voluntary giving to electoral campaigns while forcing taxpayers into “public financing” schemes of dubious constitutional and practical value. And some would go further to regulate how private organizations engage and mobilize their members and supporters to affect the public-policy debate.
Their arguments may sound neutral with regard to political outcomes, but don’t be fooled. The goal here is to remove obstacles to bigger government, more entitlements, and higher taxes. And the means are taken straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Finally, instead of wringing your hands or balling them into fists, you can settle down, look around, and find other hands to shake. As long as governments can dispense billions of dollars of other people’s money, intervene in private markets, and dictate how people work and live, affected groups will spend their own time and money either defending themselves or trying to score the maximum amount of contracts, subsidies, and special treatment.
Regulating such behavior in a free society is akin to trying to dam a fast-flowing river. No matter how well you build your obstruction, you can’t eliminate the force behind the flow, the political gravity that pulls resources ever downward. The pressure will build, and will be released either through new, uncharted channels and streams – the less-visible world of 527s and independent expenditures – or through designated pipes controlled by those who build and maintain the status-quo reservoir, the incumbent politicians.
Incumbents have significant advantages here. They’ve gotten to where they are by mastering the rules of the game. They’ll agree to change the rules a bit, as long as they get to do the rewrites. Those who challenge the politicians, either in elections or on particular issues, become even more powerless after every such “reform.”
So, recognizing reality and respecting freedom, the proper response to news that North Carolina groups with whom you disagree are spending millions of dollars a year to influence the legislative process is to form your own groups to raise money or mobilize volunteers to advance your cause. If your cause elicits broad agreement and support, you’ll be able to get your message out.
Don’t wring your hands, or clench them into fists. Join your hands with your fellow citizens and build something new.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation