Our Government is Becoming "The Hunger Games"
Posted at 12:15 p.m. on Nov. 28, 2012
Glenn Reynolds: “I’m not the first to notice that Washington, D.C., is doing a lot better than the rest of the country. Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn’t what it used to be… elsewhere, the contrast is even starker.”
“Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators… So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.”
“It’s no coincidence that as the federal government morphed from an entity that did a few highly visible things well, to one that did a whole lot of not-so-visible things less well, respect for the federal government plummeted even as the political class’ wealth climbed. That’s where we are now, with a capital city that looks more and more like that of an imperial power where courtiers and influence-peddlers abound.”
