America's ruling class

Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, has penned something of a cri de coeur on the country's ruling class. While I'm not sure I agree with all of it, and the piece is a fairly lengthy, here are a few highlights which particularly resonate:

[The first tenet of the ruling class] is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.

Absolutely true, and a reflection of what a pessimistic philosophy big government liberalism is. After all, if one believes that people are basically good and capable of intelligently governing their own affairs, the rationale for intrusive government melts away. This implied belief in people's inherent baseness and stupidity then logically demands an intelligent class of rulers to look over them. It's arrogance on an amazing scale.

...By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others.

Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

This is a superb explanation of why in the midst of near economic calamity that one of the few sectors which has boomed is lobbying. Prosperity is no longer determined in the sturm und drang of the marketplace, but rather in the cushioned closed-door meetings of Washington salons. Shaping but a few pages out of the impenetrable mass of legislation which are voted on with increasing frequency can mean the difference between survival and defeat. In the current atmosphere one would have to be a fool not to curry favor with the high priests of government who dispense favors, pick winners and losers, and hold sway over huge swathes of the economy. All roads now lead to Washington.

Update: Related thoughts here.