Thread...
The more of our lives and decisions government controls, the more tolerant everyone becomes of corruption, at least among their own tribe. Big government encourages corruption by increasing the cost of integrity.
The more of our lives and decisions government controls, the more tolerant everyone becomes of corruption, at least among their own tribe. Big government encourages corruption by increasing the cost of integrity.
Think about it. If we had a night watchman state, where the government controlled <10 percent of the economy, there would be much less riding on each election. The spoils of each election would be much smaller. There would be less of the economy to divvy up.
Fewer jobs would depend on who wins elections. Winning a seat in Congress would not confer the status it does today, nor be the gateway to a lucrative career in lobbying that it is today.
In a night-watchman state, members of Congress would have much less to lose by voting to remove a president of their own party.
The situation is very different under a sprawling military-industrial-welfare state. There's a LOT riding on every election, for members personally and the constituents, interest groups, and parties they represent.
The federal government alone controls >20 percent of the U.S. economy directly (fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA…). That number climbs even higher when you count other levels of government and indirect government controls such as regulation.
Congress makes countless decisions that affect the lives of every American and interest group. Such power makes members so high-status, a heat map of Capitol Hill could pinpoint all 535 of them. (They're the ones with the bodies of staffers and reporters buzzing around them.)
The longer a member spends in Congress, the more money she can make as a lobbyist when she leaves. Especially if her party is still in power after she leaves.
In this environment, it devastate the constituents, interest, groups, and party that a member represents -- to say nothing of the member herself -- to remove a corrupt president of her party from power. Look at what happened to the GOP after Nixon resigned.
Big government pushes members of Congress to look for any B.S. rationale they can to keep their corrupt president in office. And it pushes the constituents, interest groups, and parties those members represent to gobble up that rationale as if it were apple pie.
Big Government increases corruption because it increases the cost to political parties of exposing corruption in their own ranks. It encourages parties to circle the wagons around corrupt presidents precisely because it makes the cost of integrity so unnecessarily high.
HT for triggering this thread: @GregBlanken5hip.
