Michael Lissack Increasingly Americans feel that the rules by which our lives are reg- ulated are out of touch with our actual needs. We imagine our politicians as insiders who craft laws for privileged self-interested elite groups, all the while denying our own complicity in giving these insiders their necessary grass-roots support. It is as if nobody voted for them. We talk freely about special interest groups buying votes, but less so about our willingness to sell. As a result of all this our government seems increasingly arbitrary and patch- worked. We begin to sense that our officials are playing by rules foreign to our native sensibilities. Government becomes oppressive, monolithic, irrefutable. Water, electricity, and garbage- these issues involve all of us and they are ripe with their own examples of distrust, abuse and theft. In the western United States water is perhaps the most important political and economic issue, yet water policy and its economic tradeoffs are run as if the world we live in was still the 1870’s. Agriculture receives subsidies to overuse a declin- ing resource to such an extent that in California farmers grow rice (a water intensive crop if there ever was one) in what by all rights should be a desert. In the southernmost part of the state the Imperial Irrigation District allows enough water to be wasted through leaks in its canals to service several major cities. Yet, in these same regions urban populations with no defined riparian rights pay ten or twenty times as much for water. Why? The litany I would cite is not dissimilar to that of trucks congesting New York City streets. The benefits to the many are almost non-quantifiable and diffuse, the costs to the few are known and considered high. The few thus have every incentive to organize and lobby the government to preserve the status quo. And the status quo once established is formidable. As Rauch put it,” Every program does some good for somebody, or else it wouldn’t exist.”... Most major policy decisions are made by near unanimous votes either in committee or in Congress itself. Answerability is minimized by the absence of discussion of and public information about who would benefit at whose expense. As a result, legislators have the opportunity to inject special interest provisions into the details of the law, and the incen- tive for anyone to anticipate future adverse consequences is small. Politics
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