Red Crook, Blue Crook: Political Irrationality and Corrupt Politicians

If the people can only choose from amongst scoundrels, they are sure to choose a scoundrel.
-- V.O. Key

Most elections are a choice between Bum A and Bum B.
-- Curtis Sliwa

Gail Collins and Ross Douthat engage in an interesting New York Times debate on the issue: is one party more corrupt than the other?  You can find their discussion here.

I think Collins and Douthat take a pretty superficial approach, but it seems Douthat digs a little deeper into the issue.  Collins briefly brings up the cultural aspect, but then doesn't do much with it.  Culture is obviously very relevant to political corruption and is a factor that can outweigh the size of government.  Nigeria is more corrupt than Finland or Singapore for reasons other than the size of the state sectors in those countries.  Anyway, it's kind of sad to make a cross-cultural reference to corruption without citing the fascinating annual survey on global corruption by Transparency International, which you can access here.

My own take is to harp on political irrationality, my favorite theme.  Partisan bias blinds us to the fact that Americans are red sheep and blue sheep, and the sheep part is more important than the red and blue part.  We are shorn by the political class, red sheep farmers and blue sheep farmers.  It's the shearing that should concern us more than the color of the farmer's overalls.

Politicians (of either party) can never be trusted to be fully honest because they have overwhelming incentives to lie. Politics is a game played on a slippery ethical slope, a bit like Dante's descent into hell, except that most of these folks go downhill ski-ing into the pit at full speed.

Of course we need politicians and government officials in a complex, modern society -- so what can we do?  

The answer is: watch them. Citizen oversight.  Citizen panels need to take on an administrative and budgetary audit role. Regulators appointed by politicians can never be the final answer, because the regulators are appointed by the politicians.  Just as we have grand juries to keep an eye on prosecutors, we need grand legislative and regulatory juries to keep an eye on our representatives and their appointess.  More details in the concluding chapter of Red Genes Blue Genes.

My answer to Collins and Douthat was as follows:

Gail, as a result of the phenomenon of political irrationality (principally driven by partisan bias), both liberals and conservatives fail to perceive the overlap between their parties’ respective approaches to the size of government.

Conservatives have repeatedly contradicted themselves by increasing the size and expense of government (Bush and Reagan’s military buildups) while Liberals have contradicted themselves by reducing the size and scope of government (Clinton’s welfare and deficit-reduction initiatives).

The conservative economist and social philosopher Friedrich von Hayek built a persuasive case that government power tends inevitably toward inefficiency and corruption. However, the recent global financial collapse has shown us the perils of too little government and insufficient regulation. Therefore, we should not be simplistically making assumptions that big government is liberal and good, or that small government is conservative and bad. Rather, we should seek the optimal size of government to deal with particular social problems, taking into account the extent of market failure that has created a need for a government intervention in the first place.

In other words, we should all learn to look at political issues on a case-by-case basis, rather than through the simple reflex of adopting a so-called liberal or conservative position.

Sometimes big government is needed (the CDC, W.H.O., FDA, etc — who would want to live without them?), while in other cases it leads predictably to abuses (the military-industrial complex has been looting our treasury for decades).

What’s the answer?

Citizen oversight. Just as we have grand juries to oversee the conduct of our prosecutors, we need legislative and administrative juries to oversee the conduct of our political representatives and their appointees. 

This concept has been developed substantially by scholars such as James Fishkin and Ned Crosby. We can never trust politicians to root out the corruption because the political system is based on overpowering incentives for politicians to lie and cheat. 

Trusting politicians to stop taking suspect campaign contributions is like asking athletes to stop taking steroids — naive. It’s not going to happen.

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