Campaign finance and rent-seeking

One of the main conservative complaints about "big government" (as I understand it) is a practice known as "rent seeking." The idea being that bigger government has more money, power, and favors to dole out—and thus will encourage individuals and businesses to bend government activities in such a way that benefits their bottom line.

But conservatives who complain about big government and rent seeking are, often, also very much in favor of loose campaign finance laws that allow big businesses and individuals to spend lots and lots of money ... trying to bend government activities in such a way that benefits their bottom line.

I thought about that a bit with a recent This American Life episode on campaign finance, which demonstrates--as observers already knew--that the pursuit of campaign cash is nearly a full-time job among members of Congress. I was particularly struck by this (paraphrased) quote from former Sen. Paul Feingold, who likened the process to legalized extortion:

"CEOs don't usually call you up and say they'd like to give you a lot of money. Usually it's the other way around."

Unlimited campaign money helps create the culture of rent seeking, in other words; it encourages senators and congressmen to solicit rent-seeking. The incentives are completely skewed.

Now, I imagine the conservative response to this is: "If government is smaller, then money people can still have their First Amendment rights to give cash to candidates they like without being a problem." But the torrent of money, it seems to me, ensures that government can't really get all that smaller; it'll just get bigger and more bloated and more interest-favoring in ways that benefit the people with money. One conservative pet cause--lifting limits on campaign contributions--almost certainly works against their declared main cause of making government smaller. I wonder which is more important to them?

Small government, big banks?

One reason I've never really come around to being a small-government conservative is my belief that if we put a tight leash on the feds, that will allow other large institutions--mostly big businesses, but not limited to that--to dominate me instead. Conservatives deploy the language of liberty pretty effectively, but often it's in the service of a corporatist agenda that would wouldn't necessarily feel "free" to most of us. I'm not so much sure that "big government" is as much of a problem as is bigness itself: Outsized institutions of any sort, public or private, can have outsized impacts on our lives.

So I'm intrigued by the question raised by my friend (and occasional nemesis) Steve Hayward over at Power Line. If conservatives want small government, he asks, should they also be in favor of breaking up the big banks? 

So I think I could be persuaded that the big banks should be broken up, though this requires conservatives and pro-market libertarians to set aside their cognitive dissonance over the use of centralized political power to accomplish such an end. Discuss in the comment thread.

Me? I think it's "pro-market" to actually let the market work: When banks get too big to fail, they put taxpayers on the hook for their risk-taking. You obviously can go too far in regulating the markets, but (ahem) you can also go too far in deregulating them, as well. Markets work best when they have some boundaries.

All of which has been said--including by me--a million times before. And there are plenty of other reasons I probably still won't take up the mantle of small-government conservatism: The issues that animate me seem to be ignored by or scoffed at by my conservative friends; even if liberals don't always have the right answers, I feel more comfortable with them because they're actually trying to solve the problems that look like problems to me. But small-government conservatism will be much harder for me to argue against if it doesn't leave me "liberated" to live under the tyranny of Citibank.

On immigration and Big Government, I was wrong. Unfortunately.

The other day I suggested that conservatives who really want to beef up enforcement against illegal immigration would have to live with a bigger and more expensive federal bureaucracy. I've been proven wrong by this morning's New York Times story about private companies that basically do the work of immigration enforcement for countries around the world.

The really infuriating parts of the story will be familiar to anyone who has critiqued the privatizing of prisons in the United States: The illegal immigrants who are placed in the care of these private companies are often treated like cattle—with the problem being that ranchers generally want their herd to survive. The Times documents a number of cases where immigrants died or were badly injured while in the custody of the private companies. When that happens, companies are punished by ... losing contracts. The problem: Contracts are plentiful, and companies find it easy to replace the lost income. The profit motive works only to attract big companies to profit—not to ensure that they do the job correctly. We should ask ourselves about whether society benefits when the people carrying out the work of the taxpayers are more accountable to their shareholders.

Also disturbing, to me at least, is the way the story illustrates a bizarre disconnect. While workers are largely confined to their countries of origin—or face life-threatening detention—the companies that imprison them can span the globe. The Times: "G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security." 

Not to sound all Marxist about it, but: There are no borders for Big Business. Only for people. That should trouble lovers of individual liberty—if not the corporate shills who masquerade as such.