David Boaz

Philip Bump of the Washington Post, still in thrall to the labor theory of Congress’s value, declares, “The 112th Congress, you might remember, was the least productive in modern times.” That is to say, it passed fewer bills than other recent Congresses. But all is not lost!

After the first year of this 114th Congress, more bills have been enacted than in the 112th or 113th, according to data compiled by GovTrack.us. So far, the 114th is tracking more closely with the more-productive 110th and 111th.

So good news for those of you have been worrying that you didn’t have enough new laws to discover, understand, and obey. Bump’s article is full of charts and data, all organized around the theme that a good, “productive” Congress is one that produces bills.

But as I’ve written before, journalists may well believe that passing laws is a good thing, and passing more laws is a better thing. But they would do well to mark that as an opinion. Many of us think that passing more laws – that is more mandates, bans, regulations, taxes, subsidies, boondoggles, transfer programs, and proclamations – is a bad thing. In fact, given that the American people pondered the “least productive Congress ever” twice, and twice kept the government divided between the two parties, it just might be that most Americans are fine with a Congress that passes fewer laws.

Is a judge “less productive” if he imprisons fewer people? Is a policeman less productive if he arrests fewer people? Government involves force, and I would argue that less force in human relationships is a good thing. Indeed I would argue that a society that uses less force is a more civilized society. So maybe we should call the 112th and 113th Congresses the most civilized Congresses since World War II (the period of time actually covered by the claim “least productive ever”), and the first session of the 114th Congress slightly less civilized.

As before, I wonder if congressional reporters would applaud the productivity of such Congresses as

The 31st Congress, which passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850

The 5th Congress, which passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798

The 21st Congress, which passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830

The 77th Congress, which passed Public Law 503, codifying President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian Americans, in 1942

The 65th Congress, which passed the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition), the Espionage Act, and the Selective Service Act, and entered World War I, all in 1917

And hey, fans of legislation: If you’re really disconsolate over the passage of barely more than 100 new federal laws a year, take heart: According to my former colleague Ryan Young, now with the Competititive Enterprise Institute, federal regulators are on pace for the most pages in the Federal Register in a single year. They’ll need a strong final week, but Ryan thinks they can break the old record of 81,405 pages of new regulations. Will the Washington Post hail the regulators’ “productive” year? How about the Americans who have to comply with those regulations?

The front page of the Washington Post Real Estate section promises a neighborhood that “has a home in every price range.”

Inside, though, we learn that “Sleepy Hollow includes everything from ‘starter houses’ costing around $600,000 to multimillion-dollar properties on acre-plus lots.”

In most of the country that would be considered the wealthy part of town, not a community with “a home in every price range.”

That’s part of the reason that more and more Americans see Washington, D.C., much like the Capitol in “The Hunger Games,” as a rich and powerful city increasingly isolated from the country whose production supports it.

The Census Bureau reported that between 2000 and 2012 median household incomes in the United States dropped 6.6% — from $55,030 to $51,371. But the income of the typical D.C. household rose 23.3% between 2000 and 2012 to an inflation-adjusted $66,583. Add in the suburbs, and the Washington area median income was $88,233.

A rising tide of government spending may be bad for the American economy, but it’s great for the Washington area.

A rising tide of government spending may be bad for the American economy, but it’s great for the Washington area. Washington is wealthy and getting wealthier, despite the very slow recovery in most of the country. Seven of the ten richest counties in America, including the top three, are in the Washington area. That partly reflects the fact that federal employees make substantially more money than private-sector employees. And it also reflects the boom in lobbying and contracting as government comes to claim and redistribute more of the wealth produced in all those other metropolitan areas.

Money spent in Washington, as with most national capitals, is taken from the people who produced it all over America. Washington produces little real value on its own. National defense and courts are essential to our freedom and prosperity, but that’s a small part of what the federal government does these days. Most federal activity involves taking money from some people, giving it to others, and keeping a big chunk as a transaction fee.

In most of the country actual wealth is created – food, energy, software, automobiles, financial services, capital allocation, movies and television, medicine — but Washington’s economy is based on the confiscation and transfer of wealth produced elsewhere. As such, Washington’s wealth is a net loss for economic growth in the country.

Every business and interest group in society has an office in Washington devoted to getting some of the $4 trillion federal budget for itself: senior citizens, farmers, veterans, teachers, social workers, oil companies, labor unions, the military-industrial complex—you name it. The massive spending increases of the Bush-Obama years have created a lot of well-off people in Washington. Consulting and contracting exploded after 9/11. New regulatory burdens, notably from Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, are generating jobs in the lobbying and regulatory compliance business.

Walk down K Street, the heart of Washington’s lobbying industry, and look at the directories in the office buildings. They’re full of lobbyists and associations that are in Washington, for one reason: because, as Willie Sutton said about why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.”

Business people know that you have to invest to make money. Businesses invest in factories, labor, research and development, marketing, and all the other processes that bring goods to consumers and, they hope, lead to profits. They also invest in political processes that may yield profits.

If more money can be made by investing in Washington than by drilling another oil well, money will be spent there.

Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek explained the process many years ago in his prophetic book “The Road to Serfdom”: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”

As the size and power of government increase, we can expect more of society’s resources to be directed toward influencing government. That’s good for Washington homeowners, but it’s not good for economic growth across the country.

I’ve been watching “Childhood’s End” on the SyFy channel this week. I remember the book, a 1953 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, being a big deal when I was in junior high school. My bookish friends and I all read it. But I had little memory of the plot, so watching the show is an entirely new experience. It’s well done, mysterious, maybe a little slow. But I noticed one thing that reminds me that it was written by a British author educated in the first half of the 20th century.

The technologically superior alien Overlords arrive, take control of earth, and impose their rule on us without any real challenge. They announce that they will end war, poverty, and injustice. And they do, just like that. Sure, a few cranks in the #freedomleague complain that we’re not free, but nobody denies the peace, abundance, and good health that the Overlords have delivered. Earthlings don’t even have to work any more. That is, the book and the miniseries don’t even stop to ponder whether absolute centralized government – terrestrial or alien – could deliver more peace, harmony, and abundance than a market system. It’s just taken for granted. 

And that’s a common theme in mid-century sci-fi. In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov imagined a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory that could predict the future. Because human action, taken en masse, can be predicted for millennia.

And as I wrote on Ira Levin’s death, his wonderful libertarian novel This Perfect Day reflected similar assumptions about centralization and government planning. The novel is set 141 years after the Unification, the establishment of a world government guided by a central computer. The computer, Uni, provides all the members of the human race with everything they need - food, shelter, employment, psychotherapy, and monthly “treatments” that include vaccines, contraceptives, tranquilizers, a drug to prevent messy beard growth, and a medication that reduces aggressiveness and limits the sex drive. Everyone loves Uni, which gives them everything they could want, except for a few hardy rebels who just value freedom.

But like Clarke and Asimov, Levin was caught in the intellectual milieu of his times. (The novel was published in 1970.) He understood the cost to freedom of a government that controlled and provided everything. But he did seem to believe that such central planning would be efficient. He had the rebels worry that if they managed to shut down Uni, planes would fall out of the sky, people would die, trains would crash, food wouldn’t get to the dinner table. In other words: centralized planning worked, in the view of Levin, Clarke, and Asimov.

In this starry-eyed view of the economic efficiency of planning, the authors were led by the world’s most famous economists. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, wrote, “the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.” And Paul Samuelson wrote in his widely used textbook: “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth…. The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.” Actually, novelists writing in the 50s and 60s could be excused for their misconceptions more than Galbraith and Samuelson, economists who wrote those lines in the 1980s, only a few years before the final collapse of Soviet-style socialism.

In 1985, I had the economist Don Lavoie send Levin a copy of his fine book National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, inscribed something like “in the hopes of persuading you that central planning is no more workable than it is humane.”

I think some of the newer dystopian novels – such as Hunger Games, The Giver, and Divergence – are less prone to such misplaced confidence in planning. Those authors seem to realize that centralized control may benefit the planners, but it won’t make society prosperous. That probably reflects the failures of planning in both the communist countries and the western welfare states, which weren’t so obvious when the earlier authors were writing. Which is why writers at Salon and the Guardian keep complaining about dystopian novels and films that cause people to question the benevolence of the state.