Theft at the Public Till
seems caught in a kind of trap. Government tries to do more, yet people are less satisfied; politicians rail against special interests, yet special interests proliferate. From the individual’s point of view, it always makes sense to hire a lobbyist, or vote for a politician, who can bring you a subsidy or use public resources to solve what you believe are pressing problems. But if everybody follows this seemingly sensible logic, everybody spends more and more time chasing everybody else’s tail” and no one is focused on the global picture -- answering the question what do we need not what does Joe want. America’s news media insists that crises and emergency responses are taking place every day and in every arena. Contrary to the way we usu- ally speak of it, the news isn’t simply a report of what happened yesterday. It’s a story, with characters, action, plot, point of view, dramatic closure. Moreover, it’s a story about crisis and emergency. As officials and journalists adapt to the news story’s preconception of ordinary events as crises and the front page’s preconception of ordinary days as times of great excitement and historical consequence, the actions they undertake and the stories they tell become fabrications. The news stops representing the real world and begins to falsify it. What’s actually going on in the real world is the ordinary business of ordinary institutions. When the crisis is only simulated, as it is in the world according to the news media, the level of mendacity and exploitativeness soars through the ceiling. Facts in the news generally remain true, that much being necessary to maintain the credibility of the entire exercise. However, sooner or later almost everything else becomes a fabrication. The public discourse degen- erates into a farrago of invented cases, illusory programs, government inter- ventions that make matters worse, benefits to the undeserving, punishment of the innocent, sneaky heroes, villains whose only offense is to be on the losing side, and lies of every size and description. Emergencies and crises open up a giant loophole in our textbook image of an eighteenth century constitutional society. We have a naive belief that normal constitutional government is a stately, deliberate, often quite princi- pled affair. Rules predominate, people and institutions have prescribed roles, powers are both conferred and limited, the objective of public processes is to
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