Here’s a lovely question for a rainy day in NYC: Why don’t more politicians kill themselves given the depth and scale and reach of their failures? At the very least, why don’t more politicians seem depressed? Look at the financial condition of the states and the federal government. You wouldn’t exactly be surprised to learn that the suicide rate among professional politicians had increased in the last year.
A businessman loses millions of dollars, becomes ashamed and despondent, and then decides to end his life. I’ve read this story several times in the last year. Far more frequently, we read about politicians wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on failed programs, spinning the failures as “well intended moves in the right direction,” and then running for re-election, if not higher office. I can’t remember the last time I read about a single professional politician offing himself. Strange, that.
Do political leaders value their lives more than business leaders value theirs? I doubt it.
I daresay that Congressmen who have helped to increase funding for the status quo in public education but also somehow manage to have a shred of conscience should experience a modicum of suicidal ideation when reviewing the abject failure of their spending. At least a nightmare or two.
But that’s not satisfying to me. Where is the actual retribution for their negligence on education and other public policy issues where government has become less effective and more costly over time? Businessmen in general are accustomed to the practical experience of accountability, which essentially is justice. Successful businessmen thrive on accountability, whereas the most successful politicians elude it. Businessmen who don’t kill themselves when their businesses fail must deal with real world losses. They can’t keep failing and expect to succeed. That would be preposterous. Quite the contrary is the case with professional politicians.
In competitive markets, profits and losses are signals from consumers to producers about the quality of the decisions they’ve made. It is impossible for a business owner to thrive if her decisions continue to ignore customer feedback. In many ways, signals of failure and the adaptive responses they encourage are responsible for success. But that doesn’t change the fact that some businessmen will make decisions that are so bad that there’s no way to save their business, and they’ll have to start all over again.
(((((Curiously, the only way most government enterprises “succeed” (ie, receive budget increases) is by failing to accomplish some or even all of their goals in the previous year. “If we had more funds..” leads to budget increases; “we met our objectives…” leads to budget cuts. More on that some other time.)))))
Politicians (1) compete to keep their jobs and expand their power (2) compete to advance particular public policies (those likely to help them get reelected), and (3) compete to be perceived as responsible for policies that generate good results and opposed to policies that generate suboptimal results, regardless of how they actually vote. (For example, remember Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq at the president’s discretion, but portrayed herself as opposed to the substance of that vote). In other words, professional politicians can (and do) make bad decisions on a regular basis, but still thrive. It helps them that (1) they’re playing with the house’s money (and with the power to print money out of thin air), (2) the ill effects of their policies affect others directly and them (mostly) indirectly, and (3) those ill effects are frequently difficult to trace to one particular vote of one particular politician.
What does it cost a politician to support the continuation of a failed policy? The entrepreneur will lose her business for following such a course of action (or they used to before the bailout proliferation). The politician can still secure the support they need to be re-elected (eg, gaining the support of the teachers union by promising to support a failing policy of automatic tenure).
So politicians are not losing when they support bad public policies, they’re winning, and at your and my expense. No wonder so few of them kill themselves and so many of us wouldn’t mind if they did. We experiences the losses related to their failures, the impact on our society of generations of high school graduates who can’t read, difficulties accessing and affording health care, and on and on. They’re experiencing completely different consequences (ie, the support of a union, the support of an industry PAC, quid pro quo from fellow politicians). Their calculations are inextricably linked to their re-election considerations. Their challenge is to balance their career interests with those of stakeholders in the outcome of any given vote.
Let’s say there is a $100 billion dollar bill about to be voted on in Congress. For the purposes of this example, suppose taxpayers are the only source of revenue for the federal government (they’re not). There are over 134 million taxpayers in the U.S., so the per capita financial impact of the bill’s passage would be approximately $746. That’s not an insignificant charge, but it’s small change compared to the gains the stakeholders (firms and their lobbyists) are chasing. For example, a bank employing 150,000 people lobbies for and receives $25 billion (a per employee gain for the bank of over $16,000.00, and no, I realize the money would not be cut into equal checks for each employee). Obviously, the bank will be far more motivated to support the bill than taxpayers will be to oppose it.
The point is, professional politicians work harmoniously with interested parties to pass legislation with concentrated benefits for those who can help them get re-elected. The costs are so dispersed that taxpayers largely ignore these shenanigans. This is one facet of public choice theory, one of its sharpest contributions to our understanding of why political processes that hurt many and benefit few are ubiquitous.
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