In our society, our elected leaders function as power brokers. This is particularly true of legislators, who do not have direct control of government institutions. However, even our elected executives exercise most of their control through political appointees, and these appointees must be approved by legislative bodies.
What does a broker do? In this context, dictionary.com defines a broker as “a person who functions as an intermediary between two or more parties in negotiating agreements, bargains, or the like.” Don’t our elected leaders broker the interests of the organized political constituencies that helped them to get elected (For a discussion of organized political constituencies, go here.)?
Unfortunately, during the intervening 200 years, we have forgotten what the Founders intended when they wrote the Constitution. Instead of merely functioning as power brokers, our elected leaders want to run the entire show. What can we do to put our elected leaders back in their proper place?
To begin, we must remember that each of us has limited abilities and a limited skill set. Even though lawyers, the professionals we principally elect to public office, are highly trained, their skill set is actually quite narrow. While lawyers may know a great deal about Law and the powers of persuasion, the chances that any particular lawyer also has expertise in managing a large enterprise, scientific research and the construction of public transportation systems is nil. Some things are best left to other professionals.
So how do we get the lawyers out of the way? After 200 years, chances are that we are not going to stop electing lawyers to public office. Nonetheless, that is not necessary to solving the problem. Such a solution might even be counterproductive. As power brokers, lawyers probably have the most expertise of any professionals. In fact, lawyers are too good at what they do. Instead of trying replace lawyers with other professionals, we need to resist their persuasions.
Let look at the solution by way of an example. The high growth urban areas in Virginia, particularly Northern Virginia are suffering traffic congestion. As a result, the folks in Virginia’s Generally Assembly have debated, negotiated, made some deals, and passed a transportation bill that would supposedly fix this problem. Now this bill is awaiting the governor’s signature (here and here), and the governor has promised his own deal making (here). Yet when all is said and done, our elected leaders must come to us for our approval. Then, as voters, we get to tell them if we are happy with this deal (here).
Of course, we are not going to be happy with this deal. So the lawyers have already resorted to practicing another of their remarkable skills, fixing blame. Thus the principal product of this bill has been finger pointing. Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans blame Democrats, Rural Virginians blame Urban Virginians, Urban Virginians blame Rural Virginians, and so forth. Yet, in truth, the fault is our own. We are the reason for this stupid mess; we believed the promises of politicians.
I got this in an email, but I am afraid I do not know exactly where the art work and such originated. My compliments and my apologies to the author.
Would you buy a pig in a poke? When you go shopping, do you pay before or after you see and have your purchase? Of course not! Then why do we buy roads from politicians before they build them? What even qualifies politicians, mostly lawyers, to design and build roads? Nothing, of course.
If we want a good deal on government, we have to restrict our elected lawyers to what they know best, brokering deals. If we want a good deal on roads, we have restrict of our elected officials to brokering deals on road construction. Politicians have no business deciding where and how to build roads.
If we want a say in the deal, we cannot give up our leverage; we cannot pay for the roads until we drive on them. Such roads are called toll roads. When toll roads are built with private financing and paid for by user fees, then our elected leaders can only broker the deal. When road construction decisions are driven by economics, lawyers have very little say in how and where such a road is built. And why should lawyers decide?
Instead of politicians risking our money on transportation infrastructure decisions, we should have investors projecting the need and risking their money. Instead of politicians designing roads to satisfy special interests, engineers should be designing roads to maximize traffic flow. Instead of politicians spending our money to maximize their personal political benefit, accountants should be calculating the return on an investment.
Before we give up our money, don’t we want to make certain people have worked for it? If bond investors do not make a profit unless we drive, then to make sure they get a decent return on their investment, bond investors will keep an eagle eye on VDOT. Would that be a problem? One way or another we will pay for our roads. Why not make certain we get what we pay for?
Government power is easily abused. Whenever we resort to government to fix a problem, we tempt our leaders deprive us of our wealth and our choices. Thus government should be the solution of last resort. Even when we must resort to government, if at all possible we should not pay for government services until we have received those services. We should never give government leaders more authority than they need.
Our nation’s Founders designed a limited government, and they designed a wonderfully simple system. Modestly, the Founders expected citizens to attend to their own affairs. In their scheme, the Founders expect that government would principally function to maintain order and justice.
The Constitution is not about baby sitting America’s citizenry. The Founders expected that the government would run only a few of our society’s institutions; they wrote a constitution specifically intended to limit the role of government. Unsatisfied with that, the citizens of the time insisted upon a Bill of Rights that further limited the power of government. Those citizens understood that they were the best qualified people to run their own lives.
This post is the final installment in a four-part series. Here are links to the first three posts
