Free To Choose: a personal Statement

The Tide ls Turning
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likely to be to try to influence a bureaucrat to rule in your favor.
You may appeal to your elected representative, but if so, you
are perhaps more likely to ask him to intervene on your behalf
with a bureaucrat than to ask him to support a specific piece of
legislation.
Increasingly, success in business depends on knowing one's
way around Washington, having influence with legislators and
bureaucrats. What has come to be called a "revolving door" has
developed between government and business. Serving a term as
a civil servant in Washington has become an apprenticeship for
a successful business career. Government jobs are sought less as
the first step in a lifetime government career than for the value
of contacts and inside knowledge to a possible future employer.
Conflict-of-interest legislation proliferates, but at best only elim-
inates the most obvious abuses.
When a special interest seeks benefits through highly visible
legislation, it not only must clothe its appeal in the rhetoric of
the general interest, it must persuade a significant segment of
disinterested persons that its appeal has merit. Legislation recog-
nized as naked self-interest will seldom be adopted—as illustrated
by the recent defeat of further special privileges to the merchant
marine despite endorsement by President Carter after receiving
substantial campaign assistance from the unions involved. Protect-
ing the steel industry from foreign competition is promoted as
contributing to national security and full employment; subsidizing
agriculture as assuring a reliable supply of food; the postal mo-
nopoly as cementing the nation together; and so on without end.
Nearly a century ago, A. V. Dicey explained why the rhetoric
in terms of the general interest is so persuasive: "The beneficial
effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation,
is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects
are gradual and indirect, and lie out of sight. . . . Hence the
majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue
favor upon governmental intervention."
This "natural bias," as he termed it, in favor of government
intervention is enormously strengthened when a special interest
seeks benefits through administrative procedures rather than legis-
lation. A trucking company that appeals to the ICC for a favor-

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FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement
able ruling also uses the rhetoric of the general interest, but no
one is likely to press it on that point. The company need per-
suade no one except the bureaucrats. Opposition seldom comes
from disinterested persons concerned with the general interest.
It comes from other interested parties, shippers or other truckers,
who have their own axes to grind. The camouflage wears very
thin indeed.
The growth of the bureaucracy, reinforced by the changing
role of the courts, has made a mockery of the ideal expressed by
John Adams in his original (1779) draft of the Massachusetts
constitution: "a government of laws instead of men." Anyone
who has been subjected to a thorough customs inspection on re-
turning from a trip abroad, had his tax returns audited by the
Internal Revenue Service, been subject to inspection by an
official
of OSHA or any of a large number of federal agencies, had oc-
casion to appeal to the bureaucracy for a ruling or a permit, or
had to defend a higher price or wage before the Council on Wage
and Price Stability is aware of how far we have come from a rule
of law. The government official is supposed to be our servant.
When you sit across the desk from a representative of the Internal
Revenue Service who is auditing your tax return, which one of
you is the master and which the servant?
Or to use a different illustration. A recent Wall Street Journal
story (June 25, 1979) is headlined: "SEC's Charges Settled by
a Former Director" of a corporation. The former director,
Maurice G. McGill, is reported as saying,
"
The question wasn
'
t
whether I had personally benefited from the transaction but rather
what the responsibilities of an outside director are. It would be
interesting to take it to trial but my decision to settle was purely
economic. The cost of fighting the SEC to completion would be
enormous." Win or lose, Mr. McGill would have had to pay his
legal costs. Win or lose, the SEC official prosecuting the case had
little at stake except status among fellow bureaucrats.
WHAT WE CAN DO
Needless to say, those of us who want to halt and reverse the re-
cent trend should oppose additional specific measures to expand

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