First Principles

Jon Ralston wrote a fascinating column this weekend arguing for reforms to the Legislature that were inspired in part by NPRI’s recent lawsuit arguing that state employees cannot legally serve in the State Assembly or Senate.  Primary among Ralston’s complaints is the part-time nature of the Legislature itself.  He argues:

But the worst and most debilitating feature of the Legislature is that it is part-time, so conflicts, whether with public or private sector employment, are guaranteed. Critics often miss just how cancerous this can be to public policymaking, not just because lawmakers have to serve two masters but because lobbyists exploit the conflicts to skew votes or sully recalcitrant lawmakers in the media.

Ralston’s solution to this is to make being a legislator a full-time job, so conflicts are eliminated.

I admit that when I first heard about this lawsuit, I had a very similar thought.  Ralston isn’t wrong when he identifies the methods of corruption in our current system.  And there are other things he identifies that should be supported whole heartedly, like greater transparency in political donations.

But the problem is that his primary “solution” only addresses the “hows” of graft and conflict – the reasons we have so much corruption in politics thee days in the first place are far more fundamental.

The bottom line is that the only way to limit the corruption of government officials is to limit the reach of government in the first place.  The less intrusive Carson City is in the daily lives of both businesses and local municipalities, the less “need” those entities will feel to attempt to pull Legislators’ strings.  When government gets as big and intrusive as it currently is at all levels, corruption from every sector is inevitable.

~~~

The first refutation to the full-time solution is to look at the Exhibit A of full time legislatures – the US Congress.  Is there anyone who wants to argue they aren’t rife with corruption?  That Congress isn’t a diseased institution?

Exhibit B is right next door in California.  They also have a full time legislature, and to call their political system dysfunctional is an insult to dysfunctional government everywhere.  Indeed, there are efforts there to change it back to a part time legislature (not that it would help if they did – their problem of too much government is the same as ours, except orders of magnitude worse.)

Exhibit C is Illinois.  ‘Nuff said.

~~~

One of the main reasons full time is no less corrupting than part time is that almost no one these days relies on a single source of income, and it would be unrealistic to expect anything different from our lawmakers.  I think that’s doubly true for the sort of ambitious person that usually runs for public office.

The most basic example of this is a simple retirement mutual fund – almost everyone has some basic investments.  The various companies those funds invest in are almost certainly impacted in some way by various state regulations.  Should we not permit them to plan for their own retirement?  With all the financial liability PERS currently faces, we don’t want to give every lawmaker who has ever served so much as a single term a guaranteed pension for life, do we?  And if we did, wouldn’t that incentivize them to write endless future checks to themselves and every other public employee in the system?

Even if we eliminated other sources of income for full time lawmakers, could/should we prevent spouses from working or investing?  Other family?  And don’t we want ambitious and successful people in the legislature?

I suppose we could pay lawmakers so much that we could justify outlawing any other income stream.  But then the pressure to keep their jobs would be enormous, as they would have become accustomed to a lifestyle almost none of those folks could achieve outside of politics.  Tell me THAT isn’t a recipe for temptation!

~~~

The argument to this might be that we simply must elect better people, people who will Do The Right Thing no matter what their personal stake is.  Certainly we can and should do this to the extent we can.  Various examples of the corruption in our system, like this one from Victor Joecks, involve people acting in obviously unethical ways, as opposed to good people torn by two masters with conflicting interests (which I believe is the case of most of our legislators in both parties, public and private sector employees alike).  Those bad apples need to be disinfected with light and run out of Carson on a rail by their constituents if voters in their districts care to do so.  (And if they don’t, well, we get the government we deserve in a democracy, don’t we.)

But while a legislature of saints would be nice to have, it’s never going to happen.  Humans are humans.  Indeed, the principle underlying our entire system and philosophy of government – including the separation of powers clause currently being litigated – is that all people are sinners, all people are corruptible, and that the more power any one individual has, the more corrupt that individual almost certainly will be.

The only answer to this is to limit the power of those who would be corrupted by it by limiting what government can do in the first place.  For example, Nevada is one of the worst states in the union when it comes to dictating what insurance companies must cover – an absurd intrusion on the right to contract freely.  If the Legislature gets to choose what people must buy, of course companies with something to sell are going to lobby hard to be on the “must buy” list!  Who could blame them?  Of course politics gets in the way of good policy when government has this much power!

That’s just one example.  There seems to be no industry or profession in Nevada not heavily regulated (not even “music therapists” are untouched in this allegedly “libertarian” state!).  We should worry more about what tasks we allow our legislators to do than how long we give them to do it.

~~~

One of the commenters on Ralston’s piece argued against his proposal by saying:

Power should be temporary and not full time.

This misses the boat entirely, and perfectly illustrates why the debate over how long and when legislators should serve has very little to do with how honestly they will serve once elected.  Who cares how temporary power is if it’s functionally unlimited while it’s being wielded?  Who would you rather face as your adversary – a guy swinging a wiffle bat “full time”, or a guy who carries a machine gun on a “temporary” basis?

Government power must be limited at all times.  It doesn’t matter if the legislature meets 300 days a year or 30, if there are not serious, significant limits on what they can do while they are in session, our liberty – along with good, honest governance for the benefit of the people – will never be secure.