When I write about the “inbred corruption of Washington” or “Washington’s culture of corruption,” I’m not merely taking pot-shots at the political elite.
trying to make a very serious point about the way in which big government enables immoral behaviorby both elected officials and various interest groups.
Heck, in many ways, government has morphed into a racket designed to enrich the lobbyists, insiders, contractors, bureaucrats, and politicians.
They play, we pay.
Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard has an entire new book on this topic and he highlights how big government-enabled corruption harms the middle class in a column for National Review.
...If we think of corruption merely as illegal activity, we’re defining it too narrowly.…the better way to understand it is as James Madison might have. InFederalist 10, he worried about the “violence of faction,” which he defined as a group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”This is all too common in public policy. From farm subsidies to Medicare, regulatory policy to the tax code, and highway spending to corporate welfare, our government does violence to the public interest by rewarding the interest groups that lobby it aggressively.
Cost then explains that this corruption-fueled expansion of government is very damaging for the middle class.
…corruption is a loser for the middle class. Middle-class Americans do not have the money to pay for lobbyists to make sure they are getting a piece of the action. They don’t usually contribute to political candidates, and when they do, it is typically for a presidential candidate whose ideas they think are sound. They do not subsidize the otherwise obscure subcommittee chairman with oversight on a critical policy. And, of course, they cannot offer politicians seven-figure employment opportunities for post-government life. And yet the middle class foots the bill. Average Americans pay higher taxes to subsidize this misbehavior…
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