Michael Lissack Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania, had some trouble in 1992, he responded by touting his seniority, which he dedicated ‘to using every bit of influence I can.’ ‘On the campaign trail,’ reported The Economist, ‘Mr. Specter has something for everyone. He fights as hard as the best Democrat for import quotas on steel. Roads? He has brought back $1.28 for every tax dollar sent to Washington.’ Senator Alfonse D’Amato, the New York Republican, ‘makes the clearest, rawest pitch in politics,’ reported The Washington Post in 1992: ‘Look what I done for you lately,’ D’Amato said. ‘If you put the pie out, don’t blame me for wanting a slice of the pie for my people-who’ve gotta eat also.’ Such is the logic of transfer-seeking.” “Public-interest advocates are especially indignant if you suggest that they, too, are playing the game. You soon discover that everybody is a selfless public servant. Not only does everybody say so, almost everybody believes it. One of the game’s most wickedly ingenious defenses is that it allows every individual player to think that he is serving the greater good while everyone else is evil. The conceptual breakthrough comes when you realize that it doesn’t matter whether the people playing are vicious opportunists or high-thinking moralists. Whether the people engaging each other in distrib- utive struggles are idealistic or cynical, the economic outcome is the same: people devote scarce reserves of time, energy, and money fighting back and forth over existing wealth.” Rauch’s parasites “make their livings by turning society’s pursuit of the common good to private advantage. Yet they never present themselves in this light. They speak of themselves as neutral, expert, beneficent providers of needed services to society. They are students of policy problems, gather- ers of information, managers of trends, doctors of the body politic, mediators of conflict, experts on the future in a changing world, architects of global survival, security engineers. They talk like professors, think tank staffers, public health doctors, theologians, ethicists. The one thing they don’t admit to is what they are.” “These people practice a politics of self-interest in which no one owns up to an interested self. The clients and constituents on behalf of whose selfish interests these selfless servants toil are invariably highly deserving.
54
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online