The U.S. Congress has made a mockery of democracy with this incumbent protection racket

Thomas J. DiLorenzo: Our monopoly government | The Examiner | Oct 13, 2006 4:00 AM (19 hrs ago)

BALTIMORE - If the Sherman Antitrust Act applied to government, almost every member of the U.S. Congress would face millions in fines and possibly jail time. That’s because the U.S. Congress is a monopolist par excellence.

Consider the U.S. House of Representatives, where 99 percent of incumbents won re-election in 2004; 98 percent in 2000; and 96 percent in 1990. It’s been that way for at least the past four decades with a few brief exceptions, such as the 1994 “Republican Revolution.”

Politicians have created virtually insurmountable “barriers to entry” (to borrow a phrase from economics) that all but guarantee lifetime tenure to anyone elected to Congress ...
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What are the barriers to entry? First, the 17,000 staffers for the 535 members of Congress — compare this figure to about 1,000 employees who assist the 650 members of the British Parliament. This army of “Hill Rats,” as they are called on Capitol Hill, constitutes a taxpayer-financed, full-time public relations/campaign staff for incumbents. Most challengers, by contrast, rely on unpaid, amateur volunteers (Sen. Barbara Mikulski employs 53 staffers, whereas Sen. Paul Sarbanes employs 44 of them).

In theory, staffers help to craft legislation. In reality, they spend most of their time campaigning for their boss’s re-election. Campaign managers are routinely picked from a congressman’s staff. ...
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Then there’s the “franking privilege,” a euphemism for taxpayer-financed postage for incumbent campaign mailings. By law, there can be no spending limits on postage for congressional mailings.

The proliferation of committees and subcommittees constitutes an even higher barrier to political competition. The main function of committees and subcommittees is to distribute “pork,” not to carefully contemplate legislation. A member of congress from an agricultural region will want to sit on as many farm committees and subcommittees as possible, for example, in order to direct congressional farm pork to his constituents. A member from the city, on the other hand, will want to sit on all the “urban affairs” subcommittees for the same reason. Mikulski sits on 15 committees; Sarbanes is on eight.
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The Department of Homeland Security has become a fountain of congressional pork-barrel spending, and is subsequently “supervised” by no fewer than 13 committees and 60 subcommittees. The DHS has been distributing so much pork that state and local governments can’t even spend it all.

North Carolina reportedly spent only about 30 percent of its homeland security money in a recent year, according to Professor James Bennett of George Mason University, author of the new book, “Homeland Security Scams.” Dick Cheney’s home state of Wyoming is probably the last place in America any terrorist would want to target, but it receives more DHS money per capita than any other state, according to Professor Bennett.

The U.S. Congress has made a mockery of democracy with this incumbent protection racket.

The only hope for a return to some semblance of real democracy — and genuine political competition or “federalism,” as the founding fathers called it — is in a massive devolution of power from Washington to the state and local levels, similar to what exists today in Switzerland. What is needed, in other words, is a second American revolution (a peaceful one this time) that would allow us to return to Jefferson’s vision of small and decentralized government. That’s the only way that Americans will ever be the masters, rather than the servants, of their own government.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College and author of “How Capitalism Saved America” (Crown Forum/Random House).