The Wisdom of Limited Government, Confirmed Again

Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, professors of political science at The Johns Hopkins University, have written Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. This review by Robert Heineman tells me all I need to know. Here are some excerpts from the review:

...Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy....

[T]he proliferation of special interests in the nation’s capital has provided bureaucrats with a ready substitute for public approval and support. In the authors’ words, “The era of the modern citizen, which began with a bang, is quietly slipping away”....

Group conflict within the beltway now dominates American politics, and by the mid–twentieth century political scientists viewed group activity as “the essence of American politics”.... With the rise of what Theodore J. Lowi has critically described as interest-group liberalism, government became little more than a broker for competing interests. Moreover, in terms of information and access, the increase in regulatory institutions at the national level has given group leaders located within the beltway a tremendous advantage over their colleagues in other parts of the nation. Perhaps of most concern, these “insider” groups themselves now discourage their members’ active political involvement....

The proliferation of groups that function without public support has been encouraged by major changes in the litigation process. By providing successful plaintiffs with a right to legal fees in many cases, Congress has encouraged attorneys to push advocacy and tort litigation, which in turn has been facilitated by judicial loosening of the requirements for standing and class action. Thus, special interests now can obtain from the courts policy decisions that previously would have required political pressure on elected officials....

Despite the acuity of the authors’ insights into the dire direction of the U.S. policy process, they seem oblivious to the possibility that big government itself is the cause of the problem....

Indeed.

In summary: The pigs keep demanding a bigger public trough at which to feed, and their "public servants" in Congress continue to comply.