Opaque by Design

Sheldon Richman
Campaign For Liberty
Saturday, January 9th, 2010

“The House and Senate plan to put together the final health
care reform bill behind closed doors according to an agreement by top
Democrats.”

That less-than-startling piece of news was delivered by House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was at the White House when she said it, so
it’s okay with President Obama.

Thus, as the CBS News headline had it, “Obama Reneges on Health Care Transparency.”

Anyone who is really shocked (shocked!) that this is happening
should avoid talking to strangers on the street. You’ll wind up
believing you own a bridge.

In other words, no one really thought Obama and his cronies were
going to make government transparent by conducting business on C-SPAN.
As the head of the Council on Foreign Relations said admiringly about
Obama in another context, “He’s learned the difference
between campaigning and governing.” Indeed. Even if he wanted to,
there was no way Obama was going to get our misrepresentatives in
Congress to do it.

The phrase “transparent government” is just this side of
a logical contradiction. A really transparent government would barely
qualify as a government at all. Imagine if you could witness all the
backroom dealing, logrolling, outright bribery, and the rest of the
shenanigans that go on under the laughable rubric
“governing.” It wouldn’t last a week.

Once in a while we get a glimpse. When Sen. Ben Nelson’s vote
on the health-insurance takeover was cynically bought with the promise
that everyone but Nebraskans would pay Nebraska’s new Medicaid
bill, there was genuine disgust — even in Nebraska. The payoff to
Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu got a similar reception. But that was just
the tip of the iceberg. Did you hear that companies with fewer than 50
employees would be exempt from the health-insurance
mandate–except for construction companies? Then the threshold is five. It’s a little favor to the construction trade unions:

“Labor unions that have negotiated health benefits for
construction workers lobbied for the provision. Without it, they said,
small nonunion employers would have an unfair competitive advantage
over companies that they say do ‘the right thing’ by
providing health benefits to plumbers, electricians, carpenters,
roofers and other workers in the building trades,” the Times reported.

This sort of thing happens every day. As Michael Kinsley once said,
the real scandal in Washington is the legal stuff, not the illegal
stuff, that goes on.

Political Transactions Costs

We can’t say we weren’t warned. A few years ago a great scholar named Charlotte Twight explained it all in her book Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over Ordinary Americans. I’m a huge fan of this book, and everyone concerned with liberty should read it closely. What I said about it in 2003 still holds:

If I may be blunt, this is a subversive book — in
the sense that if average Americans were to read and grasp it, they
would turn into libertarian revolutionaries. Why? Because Twight
documents the ways that officials systematically mislead us about what
government does. In many cases, she uses their own words to convict
them of mass deception aforethought.

The key to her thesis is the concept of political transactions
costs. In economics, transactions costs are the expenses one accepts to
engage in exchanges. To use Twight’s example, if you hire someone
to plant a tree in your yard, the transaction costs include any
expenses you would not have incurred had you planted the tree yourself.

There are transactions costs associated with politics too. These,
Twight says, are “the costs to individuals of reaching and
enforcing political agreements regarding the role and scope of
government… [t]he costs to each of us of perceiving, and acting
upon our assessment of, the net costs of particular governmental
actions and authority… of learning the likely consequences of
proposed government programs and taking political action in response to
such programs… .”

We could sum up the idea with the phrase “eternal
vigilance,” which takes time, effort, and money. Or as others
have put it, “freedom isn’t free.”

Of course the higher the political transactions costs, other things
equal, the less monitoring people will engage in. Keep in mind that any
one person’s clout is small, so the payoff from absorbing the
costs and engaging in the monitoring are also small. That results in a
government watched closely by those who stand to gain a lot (the
special interests) and not so closely by those who stand to pay, in the
aggregate, a lot (the mass of taxpayers).

Twight points out that there are “natural” transactions
costs, as with any economic activity, but also “contrived”
transactions costs — the ones “deliberately created by government officials to increase our costs of assessing and responding to government policies” (emphasis added).

You’re not apt to read about these in textbooks or
the establishment apologies on most newspaper editorial and op-ed
pages. For some unfathomable reason, most pundits don’t want us
to worry our little heads knowing that politicians may intentionally
make it more difficult for us to see what’s really going on or to
do anything about it.

But it’s hard to conclude the politicians would want it any
other way. How else to explain 2,000-page bills laden with impenetrable
legislatese — which no member of Congress will read in their
entirety — and 800-page amendments? Have you tried reading the
federal budget? Such output mocks the ideal of an “informed
citizenry.” That’s the last thing the misleaders in
Washington want.

As Oscar Wilde said, “Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.”