Although liberals and conservatives disagree about the extent to which government should be taxing and spending, there's one type of spending that I would hope both sides could agree is highly distasteful. I'm talking about the Pork Barrel. That's when individual Congressmen, usually ones who've been in Congress for some time, manage to insert items into spending bills for their home districts so that the people in those districts will keep electing them. What this does is allow corrupt politicians to remain in office continuously as career politicians. The voters may disagree with nearly everything these politicians push for when it comes to national policy, but they'll keep voting for them as long as they keep the gravy train running.

When you hear the words "corruption" and "politics" together in the same sentence, you're probably liable to think of things like Jack Abramoff and K Street. But I would argue that the corruption of the voters through pork barrel spending is the "original sin" of political corruption, because it prevents the corrective mechanism - elections - from working properly to clean out all the other types of corruption. So the questions for debate:

1. Do you agree with my characterization of pork barrel spending? Is it really as much of a problem as I've described?

2. Now for a harder question: Would you actually be willing to vote for a candidate who takes a strong stand against pork barrel spending, even if he wouldn't wind up being as much of a sugar daddy for your district as the incumbent he's running against?

3. Who's the bigger contributer to the problems in Washington: people who don't vote at all, or people who allow their votes to be bought in this way?

Great questions, Blackstone.

Pork barrelling is certainly providing a concentration of benefits to a few, while taxing all. The manner in which it is "passed" in legislation demonstrates, I feel, the embarrassment the legislators feel while doing it. If it were a thing of honor, it would stand the vote on its own merit.

I do think it is important to get the needed infrastructure for states on bridges, roads, etc. I think redoing the interstates each year and providing a bottomless pit contract to your brother-in-law's construction company is not the answer. This type of pork barrelling, giving to those who will give you large campaign contributions, is sleazy, I think.



I think if you mean will the candidate address the issue of buying votes with tax dollars to corporations who give a kick back to the legislator, then yes, I'd vote for that person. If they talk about open bid contracts and not focusing on one person, I'd give that person a thumbs up. And if they spoke of lessening tax increases from responsible spending on only needed projects then again, I'd vote for that person.



Oh, now you have hit my bone of contention. People who don't vote, in my world, are not allowed to voice opinions.

Thanks, Blackstone. Great questions.

Yes, I agree, but that's not what specifically I was referring to here. My post had more to do with cases where your Congressman manages to get federal funding for some local project within your district, just so that you, the voter, will keep voting for him. My objection to that practice is that it essentially means that the politician is buying votes from his contstituents using public money. And when that happens, those constituents tend not to pay attention to any other aspect of his record besides how much federal money he brings back to his district.

It would be one thing if the federal money was for something with a truly national purpose (such as maintaining the interstate highway system), or if the state or district that was receiving the money had suffered some serious misfortune, such as the Katrina disaster. But what I'm talking about are routine outlays to state and local governments that are perfectly capable of raising the money themselves for whatever projects they want to fund, but instead prefer to get money confiscated from people elsewhere in the country. What that means is that their representatives in Congress are playing this constant game with other Congressman to see how much they can fleece from the rest of the country, with the more senior Congressmen usually walking away with the biggest share. It's a big rotten spoils system that undermines democracy in a big way, promotes incumbency, and prevents the election of honest people to Congress.

All other types of corruption, such as the type that you mentioned above, are made possible by this system that I've described, because as long as these Congressmen keep bringing home the bacon to their districts, the people are not going to punish them for any other transgressions they commit.

I see what you're saying, Blackstone, and I agree with your stand. Other than calling attention to it in the local papers through letters to the editor, what are you going to do?

People are sold a bill of goods with campaign slogans like:"Vote Pete...he works for you. He built that new park on Corner Street so your children will have a safe place to play." People buy into that. They don't think.

I have found letters to the editors in my city to be a useful tool in generating knowledge and information.

Doesn't help much to further your discussion, and for that I am sorry.

Well, that's why I asked my second and third questions. I was trying to see if I could get a commitment from others around here to want to do something about it. I figure the first place to start in order to turn things around is to appeal to thinking people. The more it catches on among them, the more it may begin to sink in to the rest of the population that this probably is not a good thing to be doing.

With regard to the third question in particular, I don't agree that the non-voters are the biggest problem. Say what you will about them, but no non-voter has ever elected a corrupt politician. It takes a voter to do that. I think there needs to be a reevaluation of the whole notion that one's civic duty is discharged simply by going into a booth, picking a name on a piece of paper, and pulling a lever. The fact is, you could train a monkey to do that.

To really discharge one's civic duty has to involve actually thinking about how one votes. Of course there are considerations like too conservative/too liberal, depending on your preferences, and I'm not getting into that here. All I can say is that if most people were even focusing on things like that, instead of just letting their votes go to the highest bidder, that would make for a tremendous improvement in the political culture.

So I'm not one to say that those who don't vote have no right to complain. As far as I'm concerned, those who sell their votes have no right to complain. They are the source of the problem. And the more of them who can be made to see that, the better.

Is it possible that pork-barrel spending actually serves a useful economic purpose? After all, economics lives and dies by two competing factors: the availability of production, and the demand for production. The simple fact of the matter is, America has an obscene amount of production available. We could shut down half our economy and still live pretty well. The only reason a good deal of people in our society have jobs is because the rest of us are filthy stinking rich and can buy luxury items that are completely unrelated to survival. The only reason we have unemployment is because that last 6% is too lazy (and proud!) to work.

Yes, it is evil to charge all Americans for a project that will purportedly benefit a small group...unless more or less all Americans end up benefitting from such projects. And how could that be possible? Well, there is the proximate effect of increased employment from the pork-barrel projects themselves. The people directly employed by the projects are certainly happy. Then there is the increased spending caused by those newly employed pork-barrellers. That makes their community happy. And if there is enough pork-barrel spending, and it is roughly distributed equally, guess what? In effect, each taxpayer region is paying for its own projects! Of course, there is no guarantee that this is the case, and I'm willing to entertain the possibility that it's not even close to being the case.

But what is the philosophical effect of taxation? Of course, nothing more than the redistribution of wealth by the state. It's nothing more than good old fashioned socialism, without the explicit ownership of property by the state. If you consider that a lot of pork-barrel projects end up employing people in medium-to-low wage jobs (like construction), and a lot of taxes are paid by wealthy corporations, you see that pork-barrel spending is partly a way to redistribute corporate profits to hard-working Americans. Does it sound quite as bad when put that way? I'd say the American economy (and indeed, most economies) is surprisingly efficient, given the constraints in which it exists. We probably don't give it enough credit.

Leibnitz wondered if this was simply the best world God could make out of all possible worlds. Allow me to ponder whether this is the best possible economic configuration out of all possible configurations. Yes, there is certainly lots of devious corruption in the system, like Abrahamoff, Webbers, Lay, Stewart, etc. ad nausem. But perhaps that is just the necessary cost we pay for this particular socioeconomic system. And perhaps the sum benefits for this system outweigh the costs, even though those costs hit certain individuals harder than others? When a player becomes particularly egregious in his cheating, eventually the system catches up with him and removes him (a la Cunningham). But perhaps the rest of the pork-barrel system has survived for so long exactly because it provides a net benefit, despite its dubious ethical nature?

The problem with economics is that it seems to be "irreducibly complex" (to abuse a popular term these days). It's really, really difficult to judge all the effects of any given economic phenomenon. I think a good way to proceed would be to try to make a case against pork-barrel spending by taking an honest look at it in hard detail. If the case succeeds, then I'm all for it. But don't be too surprised if the pork-barrel ends up helping the little guy. It might be just the kind of cheating we can feel good about.

Suffice it to say, I'm skeptical (at best) of any net economic benefits to the country that result from government directing money towards special projects like these instead of letting the money go where the market would send it. But I wasn't really all that concerned about the economic effects one way or the other when I posted this thread. The problem with pork-barrel spending is the political effects. It turns our government into a perversion of democracy, where people vote for candidates not because they truly agree with their positions on matters of national importance, but only on the basis of whether or not they'll bring home the bacon.

If Congress felt it was really a good idea to be spending money on these projects (again, I can't really see the case for it, but whatever), then it would have to be done in a way that does not depend on the intervention of individual Congressmen, whereby one Congressman inserts an item into a bill that, standing alone, wouldn't get 10 votes. The distribution of this money would have to be made to depend on something other than raw politics. Congressmen should have to earn their votes by promoting sound national policies, instead of just being able to buy them.

And people who let their votes be bought really need to take a good hard look in the mirror whenever they start to wonder how politicians get so low-class, despite the fact that they're freely chosen by the people.

Well, I think you have a naive view of power, so let me disabuse you of your idealism. Here's a little "political science" you can derive from Game Theory. Let A be a free agent in some economy. Let S be the set of all possible strategies that A can use to achieve some goal. Now, ethics will eliminate some of the strategies in S. So let E be a function from S->S', where S' is the resulting set of strategies after you have eliminated the unethical ones. If E has any effect at all, it should be clear that |S| > |S'|, and probably by a wide margin (that is, the set of ethical strategies is much smaller than the set of all strategies).

So let us say that A is an ethical agent, so that his available set of strategies is now S'. If P is an agent that operates according to S instead of S', we see that P will be able to outcompete A in a free market because P has a much larger set of strategies to employ. Now you might object that the market will see that P is cheating, and punish him for it, allowing A to play on a level playing field. In an ideal world, that is exactly what would happen. However, we need to throw another variable into the mix: K. K(x) represents the knowledge available to the market about the actions taken by x. As long as K(P) is sufficiently low, his strategies will be no more objectionable than A's. That is, meetings done behind closed doors will necessarily involve cheating the market, because that is a superior strategy when it succeeds. Of course, the cheaters don't always get away with it, which is why Ebbers and Lay and Skilling get put on the spit eventually. But the fact that they got where they did tells you that P is clearly outcompeting A at the highest levels of competition, because the higher you go, the less scrutiny and oversight there is.

That's just a really fancy way of saying: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." We all know it's true, but perhaps we don't believe the degree to which it is true. Politicians are absolutely corrupt because honest politicians just can't compete with dishonest ones. It's an inevitable consequence of free markets and limited knowledge. You really can't engineer a system that eliminates corruption, short of increasing operational knowledge to 100%, which results in Big Brother. So you either have corruption or fascism. You can either have freedom or fairness, but not both.

Also, the concept of "freely elected" is mostly a farce. The sad truth is, most voters don't know the issues, platforms, or positions of elected candidates. They know what they saw on t.v. last before they drove to the poll. Humans are just as programmable as computers, and t.v. is the Human Programming Interface of the 20th century (the 21st century will introduce even more devious interfaces). It simply isn't possible for the average person to educate themselves on all the issues. So special interest groups control elections through advertising. Why do you think Presidential elections have gotten so absurdly expensive? Why, it's because the programming has gotten so much more pervasive and sophisticated. It's not a battle of ideas and ideals, it's a battle of spot ads and radio blurbs.

Pork-barrel spending is just another way to program the electorate, and a fairly effective one, judging by the ubiquity of the strategy. The fact that democracy works at all on the scale that it exists in the US is simply a miracle to me. It must be because a wealthy middle class really is an optimal socioeconomic configuration. I would expect a lot more exploitation than actually exists, to be completely honest. I suppose that it is the free flow of information that ultimately drives down corruption, so we can hope that progress will occur as technology exposes more and more of the dark areas of politics and the power elite. Already, the lightning fast global reach of information has probably led to the expose of more scandals and corruption than ever before. Which just shows that the framers of the Bill of Rights were very prescient in demanding a Free Press. That seems to be the key to socioeconomic liberation, even if ours is largely influenced by the Power Elite anyway.

1. Do you agree with my characterization of pork barrel spending? Is it really as much of a problem as I've described?
Given the massive economic imbalances brought about by the Government spending, I have to say it really is a problem. And I do say massive imbalance because at some point, the free market will have a way to correct the Government's habit of pork barrel spending.

2. Now for a harder question: Would you actually be willing to vote for a candidate who takes a strong stand against pork barrel spending, even if he wouldn't wind up being as much of a sugar daddy for your district as the incumbent he's running against?
Absolutely! But as the other posters pointed out, that's not going to happen.

Here's the reason why the Federal Pork Barrel spending has been going on for as long as it has. Foreigners and large banks have been buying America's debt. If Congress had to raise taxes for the common taxpayers, at some point politicians would get thrown out of office.

You haven't "disabused" me of anything. All you've done is describe the exact problem I've described, only with a bunch of arcane jargon. All I'm interested in knowing from people here is whether they want to do something about the problem, not whether they want to show off their ability to use a lot of fancy language in talking about it.

Then you obviously didn't understand my point. My point is that your question is like asking if anyone who is bored of walking wants to do something about the law of gravity. I'm saying it's literally impossible to construct a system of representative gov't at all similar to the US without ending up with effects like pork-barrel spending. Even if you could get a lot of people sufficiently indignant over the issue, I don't see how you could prevent it. You would have to field a candidate that would not engage in pork-barrel tactics. But that candidate would be seen as a non-cooperative solo player and get shut out of the real plays in Washington. He/she would be so ineffective that they would get voted right out of office on the next election cycle. Let's say you could magically replace all of Congress and the Senate with people who forswear pork-barrel tactics. How long do you think it's going to last? It just takes one person to cross that line again before you start a chain reaction and everyone else sees it as an opportunity to get a piece of the pie for themselves. I see pork-barrel reform as likely as Congress voting themselves a pay cut.

There's also the law "Thou shall not steal." The United States is well over $20 Trillion Dollars in Debt, public and private debts. Trying to build wealth by shuffling credit cards or selling Treasury Bonds is a Deception that cannot last. The people holding those T-Bonds are going to want something more than a fancy IOU note. And it's morally disgusting to think that America's children should pay more taxes because of the Government's current spending spree.

I must point out that the Founding Forefathers wrote the Constitution with the intent on seperating the idea of a Republic from a Democracy. A Republic is a country with a limited government, along with democratic accountability. A Democracy on the other hand, is 51% of the people trying to enrich themselves by taxing the other 49%. It's possible that the US may need a new Constitution to help reign in on the Government's excesses. But the Pork Barrel spending must not be tolerated.

Then I should revise my description of what you said. You described the same problem I was describing, with a bunch of arcane jargon and a some "we'll never make it" thrown in.

Yes, there's always going to be corruption in any political system. No, that does not mean we have to accept it. It especially doesn't mean it should be considered a legitimate part of the political process (many people consider pork to be the whole reason to vote for a Congressman) when it clearly is not. Those who encourage it with their voting patterns are the source of the problem. And this problem is the source of nearly all the other problems in Washington, because it destroys accountability.