With the possible upcoming impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who allegedly conspired to sell Illinois’ open U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, we should reflect on this whole sorry affair. Unfortunately, the media pundits and others are drawing the wrong conclusions.
Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, who chairs the committee considering impeachment, declared that Blagojevich created a “crisis of confidence” in state government. It is not unlike what a professor told me when former U.S. Rep. Tom Delay was indicted: He should go to jail because his actions “caused people to lose confidence in government.”
Indeed, as I see it, the real scandal lies not with Blagojevich’s taped statements, as awful as they are. Nor am I concerned that people have their “belief in government” shaken. No, the real scandal is the fact that this political hack is someone who was given life-and-death power over the lives of other people. Governors sign death warrants for execution, they make decrees that have the force of law, and generally have much control in how people live – and die.
Americans constantly run to the well of “good government,” hoping to draw up “dedicated public servants” who make decisions based upon “the common good.” Yet, the stuff that bubbles up from that well always is toxic, but that does not stop people from hoping that the next batch of political swill will have a sweeter taste.
No one runs for office on a platform of “bad government.” No one runs for office promising to enrich cronies and impoverish political enemies through the power of taxation and income distribution. Instead, political candidates promise to govern wisely and engage in behavior that will serve the “public interest.”
As we know, however, the devil is in the details. Government cannot “help” one constituency without harming another; there is no way to spread the “benefits” of government expenditures evenly. Thus, some who are taxed receive less value for their taxes than others, while others receive benefits that well exceed what they paid to the taxman.
Lest we think, however, that the essence of government is “providing services” that we cannot provide for ourselves, think again. As Fred McChesney of Northwestern University has written in his classic book Money for Nothing, government is best understood as a legal “protection racket” in which government agents extort money from people who understand that those agents can destroy or even kill them. People tend to think that such threats are limited to those involved in “organized crime,” but government is far more effective than any Mafiosi at extortion.
Take the government’s antitrust action against Microsoft a decade ago. It seems that Microsoft and most Silicon Valley high-technology firms were not sending the requisite political contributions eastward to Washington, D.C. The Washington Post even sniffed in one article that Microsoft did not even have a Washington office. How dare they not let us “wet our beaks”!
Billions of dollars later, the government was able to extract enough from Microsoft and other companies to get its message across: pay us, or we destroy you. Indeed, it was “Mission Accomplished;” Microsoft now has a new office building in Reston, Virginia, near the D.C. Beltway.
Americans were told that the rapacious monopolist Microsoft harmed consumers by making a free browser available to them (instead of consumers having to pay almost $100 for browsers made by Microsoft’s competitors). The government’s reasoning was fraudulent, a raw attempt at extortion.
The only difference between the government’s attempt to destroy Microsoft and Blagojevich’s comments was the overt crassness of the Illinois governor. No one in the Clinton Department of Justice was that tactless, but in substance, there was no difference in what the government did there and what Blagojevich did in trying to “sell” Illinois’ U.S. Senate seat.
Although Blagojevich’s alleged comments are awful, we must remember that we should not be shocked, SHOCKED to hear someone in that position speak like that. Perhaps we should be more shocked when someone in government actually does the right thing.
