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Thinking About the Cap
Protecting the public from the politicians is no easy task
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Business New Haven
3/5/2001
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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If there were any doubt that the brilliant economist James Buchanan deserved his 1986 Nobel Prize, the feeding frenzy at the Connecticut General Assembly would dispel it in an instant.
It was Buchanan who crafted the theory of “public choice” - the subversive notion that government was not your friend, had little incentive to perform for the public good, but instead was rewarded for capturing as much of other people's money as possible and divvying it up among favored special interests.
The subtext of the Buchanan argument is that the politicians and bureaucrats who share the police power that allows them to pick our pockets are as greedy and self-interested as everyone else; that public service provides as many incentives to be self-interested as selling cars or peddling life insurance.
This instinct to take from the many and give to the favored few isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as we understand what is going on and take steps to limit the ability of government to do real damage.
You can see it up at the State Capitol, its corridors jammed full of lobbyists and hangers-on of every persuasion, desperate for an extra piece of that $500 million surplus. You can hear it on the radio ads; you can read it in the solemn “white papers,” all whining that any constraints on spending, any oversight of the feeding frenzy, represents a cruel tyranny of the accountants over the unmet needs of the social workers and college professors and labor unions and subsidized choo-choo trains.
You can watch it at the public hearings, as the legislators pander to their favorites, to those who stuff mailboxes with propaganda on Election Day, who name buildings and give “man of the year” awards to legislators with sufficient “compassion.”
There is no room in any of this for the normal people, for the average working stiff whom editorial cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker famously dubbed “John Q. Public”: the beleaguered taxpayer. Connecticut doesn't give them the right to curb the worst spending instincts of government with statewide referenda. The General Assembly has no super-majority rule that would require the vast majority of the legislators to agree on how much to squander.
The public in Connecticut is numb to it, recognizing instinctively what economist Buchanan spelled out in great detail. Almost 25 percent of those legislators ran without opposition last year - the voters recognize the futility of a system stacked against them. A school of political science dubs the despair “rational stupidity.” Why should the general public, with lives to lead and wealth to create, waste precious time on the ins and outs of a process designed to take their money without accountability, without limit, without giving voice to those who write the checks?
The safeguard, the safety valve, is supposed to be the state spending cap, overwhelmingly approved by voters as a constitutional amendment to soften the blow of the state income tax, with its potential for virtually unlimited spoils for the well-connected. The cap is a toothless, loophole-ridden thing, allowing both governors and legislators to move money on and off budget, to declare make-believe “emergencies,” to encourage make-believe lawsuits and wink at judges who demand that extra money be spent on the criminal and crazy and confused - spending cap be damned.
But at least in theory, and occasionally in practice, the spending cap offers up modest protection for citizens who can't be up there at the General Assembly every day, fighting off the latest “unmet need.”
The joy of the spending cap isn't so much in the details, which encourages weird accounting gymnastics for the greedy and frugal alike, but merely in the fact that it is there - a reminder that the voters have spoken; that they demand that choices must be made; that the self-interest of government must be balanced against the interests of us all.
For the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, with no lobbyists, no auditors, no political action committees to fight the good fight, low-key vigilance can come by demanding that their local legislators fend off the needy and the greedy who want the spending cap gutted or eliminated.
The cap is not a beautiful thing, it is not a perfect thing, but it stands as the only substantive protection against the political class and its friends who know how to play the system.
Laurence D. Cohen is senior fellow at the Yankee Institute for Public Policy.
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