(Originally posted in January 2010now an April perennial)
Chevy Chase, MD, is an affluent suburb of Washington DC. Median household income is over $200K, and a significant percentage of households have incomes that are much, much higher. Stores located in Chevy Chase include Tiffany & Co, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior, Versace, Jimmy Choo, Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Saks-Jandel.
PowerLine observed that during the 2008 election season, yards in Chevy Chase were thick with Obama signsand wonders how these people are now feeling about the prospect of sharp tax increases for people in their income brackets.
The PowerLine guys are very astute, but I think they’re missing a key point on this one. There are substantial groups of people who stand to benefit financially from the policies of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate, and these benefits can greatly outweigh the costs of any additional taxes that these policies require them to pay. Many of the residents of Chevy Chasea very high percentage of whom get their income directly or indirectly from government activitiesfall into this category.
Consider, for starters, direct employment by the government. Most Americans still probably think of government work as low-paid, but this is much less true than it used to be. According to this, 19% of civil servants now make $100K or more. A significant number of federal employees are now making more than $170,000. And, of course, the more the role of government is expanded, the more such jobs will be created, and the better will be the prospects for further pay increases.
If one member of a couple is a federal employee making $100K and the other is making $150K, that would be sufficient to allow them to live in Chevy Chase and occasionally partake of the shopping and restaurants. But to make the serious money required to really enjoy the Chevy Chase lifestyle, it’s best to look beyond direct government employment and pursue careers which indirectly but closely benefit from government activity…which are part of the “extended government,” to coin a phrase.
Lobbying, for example. And this has been a very, very good year for lobbyists. Which was practically inevitable. The more the government micromanages the economy, the more having friends in Washington becomes a key success factormaybe the key success factorfor every business in the country.
The great expansion of government’s role is also very good, and for the same reasons, for lawyers whose practice is focused on regulation. Ditto for executives of trade associations, which typically exist largely to represent the common interests of the industry in governmental forums.
Trial lawyers, of course, benefit from Obama/Pelosi/Reid and their unwillingness to do anything to rein in the more predatory excesses of that industry.
Much of the federal government’s thinking, as well as day-to-day operations, is now outsourced to various consulting firms and “policy” nonprofits. Executives of these firms, including the “nonprofit” ones, often make far more money than even the highest-paid direct government employees. And higher government spending means more contracts and more opportunities for promotions and raises.
One of the best ways to make serious money in government-related work is to become an executive with one of those not-exactly-public-not-exactly-private institutions like Freddie Mac or Fannie Maewhose headquarters is, conveniently, just a few miles south from Chevy Chase. (I am picking on Chevy Chase, of course, only for exemplary purposes: the phenomenon I’m discussing is a national one, although it is most obviously visible in the DC area.)
There are other groups of people who may not be quite as affluent as some of those mentioned above, but who also stand to benefit directly from Obamaism. K-12 school administrators, for example, can look forward to increased funding flowing to their schoolsalways the key element of the “progressive” solution to educational problemsand, surely, some of it will stick to them. At the same time, the Democratic worldview makes it unlikely that any serious performance standards will be put in place, thereby helping to ensure their employment security.
Now, I have no problem at all with people making large amounts of money…in fact, I’m all for it…as long as they are making money based on voluntary exchange and they are actually helping to produce the wealth from which they are being paid.
There are certainly some government employees, and employees of the “extended government,” who are in fact wealth-producers. An air traffic controller is as much a productive part of the air transportation system as is a private-sector airline pilot. A real research scientist at NIH or CDC is as much a part of the productive healthcare research system as is a researcher at Pfizer or Medtronic. (I use the “real research scientist” qualifier because these agencies seem to be devoting an increasing portion of their resources to nanny-state scolding.)
But the productive elements of government surely represent a declining percentage of the total government and extended-government employment. Many of the individuals making $100-$170K in government probably couldn’t learn to control air traffic or develop new drugs if their lives depended on it…rather, their skill is in manipulating language, in constructing verbal formulations along the approved patterns, and their activity is primarily about the transferring and absorption of wealth. Lawyers, lobbyists, and trade associations that exist to protect companies and industries from government overreach may sometimes be beneficial in that they keep economically-disastrous things from happening; OTOH, their activities also often distort economic activities in favor of the entities that are paying them, in ways that reduce the efficiency of the overall system.
The danger is that we are entering an era in which the best way to gain wealthindeed, the only reliable way to gain wealthis to use the power of government to take it from others and redistribute it in your direction. The belief that Obama/Pelosi/Reid redistributionism is exclusively or even primarily about helping those with low incomes is incorrect. It is indeed class warfare, but of a horizontal rather than a vertical nature.
Once again I quote Benjamin Franklin:
There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice—the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but, when united in view of the same object, they have, in many minds, the most violent effects.
…and Irving Kristol:
Now, the pursuit of power is a zerosum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.
By tightly coupling the pursuit of money to the pursuit of political influence and power, Obama/Pelosi/Reid are doing great harm to the spirit of America as well as to its economy.
The public-sector labor unions are a powerful force keeping the Dems in power in CA – they have benefits far exceeding the majority of voters working in the private sector.
Two friends of mine from pre-med live in Chevy Chase. They are husband and wife and both orthopedic surgeons. They have a beautiful home but, interestingly, drive old rattletrap cars to work in the city as nice cars are stolen or vandalized. He is in his 80s now and unwell but he was one of the first surgeons to do total joint replacements. They have had an interesting professional and social life. When he was applying to medical school, he was in his 30s and had been a physical therapist, doing pre-med at night. The only school that accepted him was George Washington. Age discrimination. The same thing happened when they applied for internships in 1965. They stayed at G Washington in DC. He has been a full professor for many years. His wife was a Swedish girl that he married when she was visiting the US and, when she got bored with staying home after they married, she went to pre-med classes and was accepted to every medical school she applied to. That was 1961. She and I are one day apart in age.
I’m reminded of the old Virginia Postrel column “Curb Your Dog!”
The benefits of a large, unleashed government to those people is as much emotional and social as it is financial, but the point that it is financially rewarding – to them – is well taken.
“There are certainly some government employees, and employees of the “extended government,” who are in fact wealth-producers. An air traffic controller…A real research scientist…”
And yet they have just as much interest in expanding government as do the less productive and non-productive workers: The greater the government funding, the more jobs for scientists and the higher their salaries–and the more expensive the research facilities. To take an absurdly extreme example, a particle accelerator the size of Texas might allow some physicists to do new research but the cost would be prohibitively high although some physicists might be tempted to ignore the costs to society. And given the readiness of scientists to pretend, when writing grant proposals, that whatever they are interested in at the moment will be very useful for whatever the current hot topics are in politics, this self-interest should not be ignored.
You make many important points in this post, which I have linked to here: http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2013/04/pursuing-money-and-political-influence.html