The Sources Of America’s Political & Financial Dysfunction
The way to preserve great wealth is to buy political protection of that wealth. The way to protect great political leverage is to grease the machinery of governance with cash.
I confess that reading Francis Fukuyama’s latest cri du coeur in Foreign Affairs,America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction made me think Mr. Fukuyama has either been reading or channeling Of Two Minds.com , as his brutal assessment of America’s terminal political dysfunction reflects many of the themes I’ve been hammering on for the past 9 years.
Unfortunately for his readers, Mr. Fukuyama stops short of identifying the key dynamic in America’s dysfunction: the exhaustion of Central Planning and centralized government as a “solution” for every ill. Despite his failure to cross the goal line and put truly incisive points on the scoreboard, Mr. Fukuyama does the nation a valuable service in cogently describing the dynamics of our terminal political dysfunction.
Fukuyama describes the inevitable end-game of money capturing the political machinery of the central state: every big-bucks lobby/constituency has veto powerover Federal policies and budget priorities. In effect, every lobby can veto any initiative that crimps their power or share of Federal swag.
As a result, any serious reform that causes financial-political pain is soon reduced by entrenched interests to a toothless public-relations shell: the shell will still carry an idealistic-sounding label (“financial reform,” etc.) but the machinery of governance is unchanged.
With serious reform rendered impossible by our governance by the highest bidder, the structural problems facing the nation fester and become even more intractable/painful to fix. Ironically, this increasing vulnerability to crisis causes lobbyists to react even more rabidly to any potentially threatening reforms; as the entrenched interests recognize the end-game is approaching, they are increasingly desperate to push the inevitable cuts onto some less politically potent constituency–for example, the powerless, passive tax donkeys who pay most of the Federal taxes.
Only highly centralized governments can be so easily captured by free-spending lobbies. Consider the challenge of entrenched interests to influence government functions at the county level rather than the Federal level. Lobbyists would have to fan out to hundreds of counties, each of which has a complex thicket of local interests and constituencies who might resist big-bucks private interests.
But with the vast majority of power concentrated in Federal agencies and budgets, entrenched interests only need to buy a few key legislators and spin the revolving door between corporations and the agencies that regulate them to groom pliant regulators.
This is the dynamic that Fukuyama dares not identify, as doing so would undermine the Central State that he still holds up as the “solution” to every ill. Like all centralist reformers–even those like Fukuyama who doubt reform is even possible–Fukuyama clearly pines not for a decentralized state but for a reformed central state that functions in an idealized version of every centralist’s fantasy of good governance: America, 1942-45, when the Federal government marshalled the nation’s resources to wage global war and limited the influence of entrenched interests as a matter of national survival.
To say the central state is beyond reform is one thing; to say that centralized political power and financial wealth are the systemic sources of dysfunction is another thing entirely.
Though Fukuyama focuses on political dysfunction, the dysfunction is intrinsically political and financial: concentrated wealth and the political process are the yin and yang of a single system. It is meaningless to speak of one as being separate from the other.
The way to preserve great wealth is to buy political protection of that wealth. The way to protect great political leverage is to grease the machinery of governance with cash.
What Fukuyama cannot bring himself to see is that the ontology of the Central State leads to this end-game of competing financial-political interests fighting to protect their turf even as the storm clouds of global transformation darken the horizon.
Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog
Northwest Resident on Fri, 3rd Oct 2014 11:20 am
“The Big Money” by Rush:
Big money goes around the world
Big money give and take
Big money done a power of good
Big money make mistakes
Big money got a heavy hand
Big money take control
Big money got a mean streak
Big money got no soul
There are very few “public servants” left at the Federal level who aren’t bought and paid for to a certain extent. Some of them of course are totally bought and paid for. Big Government is heavily manipulated and controlled by Big Money, and that’s just a fact of life. Big Money deploys an army of lackeys and agents — some elected, some unelected — to influence policy and to stymie any legislative attempts to make changes that might adversely impact the goals of the Big Money Men. No wonder we have gridlock in Washington D.C. We the people of course don’t have enough spare change to overcome the influence of Big Money.
ghung on Fri, 3rd Oct 2014 11:25 am
For clarity, That’s Rush the rock band, not Rush the Phlegmball.
Northwest Resident on Fri, 3rd Oct 2014 11:45 am
How much do you want to bet that Rush Limpballs has a karaoke machine at home, and in his spare time he stands in front of the mirrored wall dressed in his fat-boy rockstar black leather get-up, singing this song at the top of his wheezy lungs.
Just trying to get a few laughs…
J-Gav on Fri, 3rd Oct 2014 3:12 pm
Often some good insights from CHS, not that I agree with anybody all the time …
I’m still unsure of his bullishness on the dollar, in the medium term. There is definitely an international move to de-dollarize growing chunks of exchange. But I do understand his point that there ain’t anybody else out there (individually or grouped) ready to take over that role for now.
Concerning this article, his point that over-centralized states will always seek to continue to grow and are thus not reformable is well taken.
Davy on Fri, 3rd Oct 2014 3:26 pm
Well said Gav
theedrich on Sat, 4th Oct 2014 1:21 am
The energy-boosted population explosion in the Third World (especially MENA and sub-Saharan Africa) is already threatening civilizational collapse. Since the Third World consists largely of pre-modern cultures, they are filled with corruption, fanaticism and crime of every sort. In order to escape the life-threatening circumstances that all this entails, vast numbers of people from those cultures are trying to emigrate to the First World just at the time when Peak Everything is stymying the growth needed to accommodate these new immigrants. Currently the reaction by the affluent classes in North America and Europe are demanding that taxpayers pay for the new arrivals as a “moral obligation.” The concept that the large population movements we are now seeing are not a moral issue but one of incipient global collapse simply does not register in the minds of those who do not or cannot take the limits to growth seriously. In America in particular, almost everything is viewed in quasi-religious, moralistic terms. Since 1492 the western hemisphere has been interpreted as infinite in every way — the el Dorado of myth. So the current diminution in the U.S. economy and employment is viewed as the result of perversity on somebody’s part. The limits imposed by Mother Nature do not enter political discussion in any serious way.
Solarity on Sat, 4th Oct 2014 2:11 am
Governance by the highest bidder” is a form of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ against which James Madison had strong feelings. Madison (primary author of the US Constitution) believed he had developed a reasonable concept to overcome such factional influences. Two chambers of Congress: one representing people and the other representing states. Madison’s Constitution called for state legislatures to appoint Senators. The Seventeenth Amendment made Senators be popularly elected. Perhaps it is time to rethink this Amendment.
Makati1 on Sat, 4th Oct 2014 5:42 am
Be patient theedrich, the 3rd world is fast coming to the 1st. Drop the curtain of lies and you would see that it is already there. 47+ million in the US soup lines already and that is in a ‘growing’ economy. Over 20% directly getting cash from the government and another 30% or more indirectly.
The infra-structure is decaying fast. Most domestic water is running through 100 year old lines. A lot of the NG lines are old enough to get Social Security.
http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/america-the-grim-truth/
The trillions needed to keep it all together are being wasted in an attempt to dominate the whole world.
Preston Sturges on Sat, 4th Oct 2014 11:16 am
Local government is likely to be more corrupt and dangerous. You don’t need lobbyists if you buy the local newspaper and saturate the rural airwaves with cheap advertisements.
Conspiracy nuts claim the federal government is plotting to violently oppress them, but when the local cops kill an unarmed person, the conspiracy nuts are likely to be the ones cheering.