An Object Lesson in Letting Leeches Vote

The century-long battle between leftist statism and small-government conservatism is often discussed in terms of political philosophy.  What's actually happened in our country, though, can better be understood if you think about the political battles as being over the nature of the playing field.

Given that both sides more or less believe in voting and that the American people pretty firmly believe that legitimate governments need to be duly elected, the challenge is to get ordinary folks to vote your side in.  In any individual election, there are plenty of tactical methods, from lying and making impossible promises to setting up "October Surprises" and mudslinging, but over time, the only sure way to win is to make voters see things your way - that is, to arrange the world so that voting for you is in the best interests of the majority of voters.

Thus we see policies like Bush's "Ownership Society" - he believed that by encouraging the maximum amount of home ownership and investing by ordinary folks, they'd vote Republican for lower taxes on their assets.  This worked until the economy crashed and their assets were destroyed.

The Left has a similar playbook in mirror-image: make the maximum number of people dependent on government so that voting Democrat for big government will personally benefit them.

It's pretty obvious that they've been rather more effective than their opponents.  Nearly half of Americans don't pay Federal income taxes at all; why should they worry about those taxes going up?  The number of Americans receiving welfare benefits keeps setting new records, and over half of Americans receive income from government.

A Scottish political thinkers who contributed to our Founders' beliefs, Alexander Fraser Tytler warned of what would happen:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The brilliance of our Founders' federal design allows us to see this principle in action, right in Washington DC, our nation's capital.

Democratic economic policy.

Too Much is Never Enough

Washington DC is not a state and shouldn't be.  In many ways it operates as if it were, however, so it makes sense to compare its tax and regulatory burden with the 50 states.  Anyone familiar with the District will not be surprised to find it down near the bottom - with slightly less confiscatory taxes than California but worse ones than Massachusetts.

What does the District do with all its ill-gotten gains?  Not much that's useful: the DC public school system is a byword for violence, corruption, incompetence, and waste, with even the most obvious solutions bitterly stonewalled by the teachers unions.

DC's last governor, Adrian Fenty, took education reform as his signature issue.  He poured the entire energy of his administration into a top-to-bottom overhaul led by famous reformer Michelle Rhee, who sacked underperforming staff right and left.  Sure enough, the kids' scores started to creep up - still in the basement, but at least no longer in the sump.

His reward?  At the last election, he was turfed out by a retrograde puppet of the teachers unions, Mayor Vincent Gray, who has been dogged by accusations of corruption and calls for his resignation since Inauguration Day.

How is it possible for a proven successful mayor to be thrown out in favor of a corruptocrat?  Without meaning to, the Washington Post reveals the answer in an apocalyptic poll of DC voters:

About 70 percent of those polled said maintaining public services should be the city government’s highest priority, while 23 percent thought holding down taxes should be. The poll was conducted April 20 to 22 among 504 registered voters, 54 percent of them black and 38 percent of them white. The margin of error was 4.4 percent.

Let's review:  DC's public services are a wasteful disaster, splashed across TV screens and newspapers for years on end.  Its taxes are egregious and business climate oppressive.  DC has even seen recent fruits of the benefits of reform.

Yet the voters still prefer higher taxes and "more public services," despite knowing that they don't work:

The poll also found that 41 percent believe the city is on the wrong track and that 35 percent believe the city is on the right track.  The findings of the poll show starkly different sentiments about the city’s direction under Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) compared with his predecessor, Adrian M. Fenty. In January 2010, a Washington Post poll found that despite Fenty’s dismal approval ratings, 52 percent of residents thought the city was going in right direction and 29 percent thought it was going in the wrong direction.

How can these facts be reconciled?

Support for a tax hike on wealthier people was at 85 percent in the poll, crossing wards, race and class. Ed Lazere, the institute’s executive director, said the results were surprising in confirming that “residents would rather see modest tax increases on wealthy residents.” ...

Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), chairman of the Committee on Finance and Revenue, said the poll should have focused on residents who would bear the brunt of the proposed tax increase. “The people who are supporting the increase are not paying the [potential] taxes,” Evans said.  [emphasis added]

What has happened in the District of Columbia is that the Democrats who've ruled local government for many decades have succeeded in building an electoral majority of welfare leeches.  Nearly 20% of the population is in poverty; of course they'd prefer higher taxes and more government!

By doing so, however, the Democrats have made sure that no major non-government business is going to set up in their jurisdiction.  Local DC politicians are so opposed to Wal-Mart bringing lower prices and jobs to their community, for example, that they make statements that are both ludicrous and racist:

Brenda Speaks, a Ward 4 ANC commissioner, actually urged blocking construction of the planned store in her ward at Georgia and Missouri avenues NW partly because of that risk.  Addressing a small, anti-Wal-Mart rally at City Hall on Monday, Speaks said young people would get criminal records when they couldn't resist the temptation to steal. [emphasis added]

Talk about having no respect for her voters!  But they keep re-electing her and her accomplices.

The End Will Come

Washington, DC need not worry about going bankrupt or driving out all the jobs.  As the home of our federal government, it will always be bailed out one way or another; it'll never end up like Detroit, with its major industry gone with the wind as it whistles through the empty shells of what once were grand palaces of enterprise and commerce but now are merely haunts for drug addicts and forgotten corpses.

What is survivable, though grim, for one city will never work for a country.  If the newly-dependent voters of America follow the example of the welfare voters of DC as predicted by Alexander Fraser Tytler, we're done for.