George Will despairs that we already have a good bit of the socialism that John McCain warned about in the waning moments of his decade-long quest for Rooseveltian power. That is, we already have a lot of government redistribution of wealth, though we have almost no overt advocacy of socialism: “This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an envious, people. It is also because the socialism we do have is the surreptitious socialism of the strong, e.g., sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.”
Rent-seeking, economists call it–using the government to get privileges, such as a grant, a subsidy, a tariff, or a restriction on one’s competition. It’s one of those things we free-marketers rail against all the time, in papers on free trade, corporate welfare, government spending, and virtually every other activity of the modern state. More broadly, we point out, as Will did, that it’s impossible to have nonpolitical allocation of trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money handed out by government. If you don’t want the powerful to lobby and manipulate in order to get their share of the money, then leave it in the marketplace. If you put it in the hands of politicians, expect political allocation.
Responding to Will, Christopher Orr at the New Republic says, “insofar as there are two kinds of spreading the wealth around, ‘rent-seeking’ (which we can all agree is bad) and ‘socialism’ (which Will implicitly concedes is less bad), conservatives are relatively more friendly to the former and liberals are relatively more friendly to the latter.” Hmmm. Is that so? I suppose if you think of the Bush administration as “conservatives,” then you have a good case. And Orr may be too young to remember actual conservatives back in the days B.G.W.B.
But I’m not. And I recall, for instance, the first program that Democrats rallied around when the Reaganites stormed ashore in 1981 with their pitchforks and meat cleavers in hand. Nexis confirms that a day after the administration made a broad budget-cutting proposal, these words led page A1 of the Washington Post: “The entire Democratic leadership in the House joined yesterday in warning the Reagan administration to keep its budget-cutting hands off the synthetic fuels subsidy program Congress created last year.” Democrats love corporate welfare, and even liberal intellectuals are far less critical of it than are libertarians and free-market conservatives.
And it’s not just corporate welfare. All the elements of the liberal interventionist state are both product and generator of rent-seeking. You can say that rent-seeking is an unfortunately inevitable by-product of having the government do good. But to want a $3 trillion federal government with vast regulatory powers that isn’t awash in rent-seeking is, as Milton Friedman wrote, like saying “I would like to have a cat, provided it barked.” Cats meow, and government money flows to those with political power.
