Gridlock, Graft and Governance

James Hanley says:

Hmm, I didn’t even realize I was the subject, more or less, of another post. Quick responses, before I shuffle off to the dreadful task of grading freshman term papers…

@Murali,
How’s that working out by the way?
Compared to what?

Most of the interference in the market comes from regulatory bodies which are part of the executive and not subject to gridlock
That’s an oversimplification. The executive branch agencies are subject to legislative oversight, and can only do what’s in the scope of authority granted them by the legislative branch. While gridlock can prevent the legislative branch from effectively constraining the executive branch agencies, it also prevents the legislature from expanding their scope of authority.

Gridlock creates an industry for special interests and lobbyists to buy legislators and therefore promotes corruption
What’s to buy if legislation is unlikely to get passed? Only non-passage itself–i.e., it offers an opportunity for special interests to pay to keep their status quo rents; to reinforce gridlock itself. When real legislation is actually going to get passed, there’s an opportunity to buy new benefits. Gridlock is no worse in this case, although it’s not obviously better, either.

Politicians in american style deomcracies throw in ear-marks or gut the effectiveness of laws to get individual law-makers to vote for particularly contested bills. This results in an increase in spending on ineffective policies.
I think that’s the wrong way to understand ear-marks. Most earmarks are just local spending projects. Wasteful, and I’d like to see them go, but in the big picture they don’t add up to a major amount of our spending. And in an imperfect world, spending on ineffective policies may be a libertarian’s best alternative–preferable to spending on actual effective policies, when we don’t want that effect. Granted, sometimes spending on ineffective policies is dreadful, like the war on drugs, but in a non-gridlocked system that wouldn’t change. Anyway, contra what some of my critics repeatedly suggest, I’m not suggesting my favored approach results in an ideal system.

@E.D. Kain,
Gridlock kills accountability.
It’s not gridlock that kills it; rather, both are a consequence of our political structure, which both creates gridlock and makes real political accountability exceptionally difficult. The lack of accountability issue has been recognized for over a half century, with the American Political Science Association issuing a report in 1950 called “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System”. So gridlock and non-accountability are related, yes, but rather than one causing the other they have a common cause. And gridlock was pretty much purposely built into the system by Founders who wanted a government that was just effective enough to hold the states together, and not do much beyond that. So it’s a feature, not a bug. If we want to eliminate gridlock, only major structural reform will do it–i.e., move to a more parliamentary system.

@Jason,
Gridlock is at best a defensive posture, not something to be wished for in itself.
I’d go along with that. If there’s actually a chance to roll back some of government’s more interventionist actions, then we libertarians will suddenly bemoan gridlock, but since–as TvD notes–there tends to be a ratchet toward ever more intervention, those roll-back opportunities will probably be rare enough that gridlock is likely to do more good than bad, from a libertarian’s perspective.

Back to Murali’s question about how it’s working out–the proper measure is not whether it’s preventing a particular policy at a particular time, but whether it is in general preventing more policies I dislike than policies I like. So to frame the question in reference to a particular time is to misunderstand the libertarian’s perspective on it.Report