A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

George Will seems to be growing increasingly libertarian...

The national pastime is no longer baseball, it is rent-seeking — bending public power for private advantage. There are two reasons why rent-seeking has become so lurid, but those reasons for today's dystopian politics are reasons why most suggested cures seem utopian.

The first reason is big government — the regulatory state. This year Washington will disperse $2.6 trillion, which is a small portion of Washington's economic consequences, considering the costs and benefits distributed by incessant fiddling with the tax code, and by government's regulatory fidgets.

Second, House Republicans, after 40 years in the minority, have, since 1994, wallowed in the pleasures of power. They have practiced DeLayism, or "K Street conservatism." This involves exuberantly serving rent-seekers, who hire K Street lobbyists as helpers. For House Republicans the aim of the game is to build political support.

Liberals, argues Will, are just as prone to serving rent-seekers, but they do so with "an easy conscience because they believe government should do as much as possible for as many interests as possible."

And, of course, that's the problem. We can't solve the current lobbyist/bribery crisis by censuring or even jailing politicians, because rent-seeking is not an individual problem; rent-seeking is woven deeply into the very structure of our government.

George Will argues that the "way to reduce rent-seeking is to reduce the government's role in the allocation of wealth and opportunity", and to a large degree I think he's right. As Jim Glass once wrote, "the small-government types on the right take [complaints] about the character of government much more seriously than [do critics of the Right]." That's why the small-government types think it ought to be limited in the first place.

But failing that — and, to be honest, there's just not a popular demand for drastic cuts in government right now — there are alternatives that don't require unpopular budget cuts. Norman at One Man's Trash points to one small, current effort...

Sens. Tom Coburn and John McCain now plan to challenge every hidden earmark. "If we aren't told who is asking for it, who benefits and its justification, we'll move to strike it," Mr. Coburn told me. He expects many earmarks to be quietly withdrawn rather than face such scrutiny.

Sunlight! The best disinfectant! But that's just a stop-gap measure. If the Coburn/McCain challenge works, we ought to institutionalize the sunlight. Yes, I'm referring again to Line Item Budgeting. We'll be publishing a piece at The New Libertarian on doing just that — changing the public choice incentives — in the upcoming days.

If there's anything the limited government and liberty crowd ought to work toward, that is it.

Along those lines, I'm continuing to keep an eye on Senator George Allen to see how far he'll take his message of "common-sense Jeffersonian conservative principles" and Jefferson's "libertarian, trusting, free-people approach.". Today, via the tremendously useful Virginia blog Commonwealth Conservative, I see Senator Allen has done an interview in which he discusses it further.  Read and hope.