In The Libertarian Mind, which is officially published today, I have a chapter titled “What Big Government Is All About” that aspires to be applied Public Choice analysis. Much of it relates to what I think Jonathan Rauch first called “the parasite economy,” the part of the economy that involves getting through government what you can’t get through voluntary market processes. Reason.com has just published an excerpt from that chapter, with a few recent examples added, such as these all-too-typical stories:
Lobbying never stops. One week in December, the Kaiser Health News reported that “growth opportunities from the federal government have increasingly come not from war but from healing.” That is, “business purchases by the Department of Health and Human Services have doubled to $21 billion annually in the past decade.” And who showed up to collect some of the largesse? Well, General Dynamics was having trouble making ends meet with defense contracting, so suddenly it managed to become the largest contractor to Medicare and Medicaid. “For traditional defense contractors,” wrote Kaiser Health, “health care isn’t the new oil. It’s the new F‑35 fighter.”
Of course, the old F‑35, despite a decade or more of running behind schedule and over budget, is still doing pretty well. That same week Congress passed the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” spending bill, including $479 million for four F‑35 fighters from Lockheed that even the Pentagon didn’t want. The Wall Street Journal reported that the bill “sparked a lobbying frenzy from individual companies, industries and other special interests”—pretty much the same language you could have read in earlier stories about Porkulus and Obamacare. Every provision in the bill—from the $94 billion in Pentagon contracting to $120 million for the Chicago subway to an Obamacare exemption for Blue Cross and Blue Shield—has a lobbyist or several shepherding it through the secretive process.
And I also talked about the parasite economy on John Stossel’s television show last Friday night:
For more on the parasite economy, and everything else you wanted to know about libertarianism, read The Libertarian Mind.
