From Big Government is this piece from US Rep Ted Budd (R-NC) on the recognition of what I alluded to in my previous post – the subsuming, by Government, of organizations and industries by mere dint of its size and spending. I’ve written for years of how organizations formerly known as charities (now calling themselves social services organizations) that used to depend on the wealthy and regular folks alike to dig into their wallets to support their missions but now end up begging on their knees to a mere handful of politicians to gain entry into the Public Treasury (what a HOWL they put up in my County when the Commissioners sliced them down to mere pittances this year). Rep Budd elaborates (emphasis mine), especially on the Durbin amendment in Frank-Dodd law that mandated fees on debit cards) :
In the United States, we’ve long had a free market system, but that system is not what it once was. Total government spending–state, federal, and local–has grown in real terms by more than 400 percent since 1965. Government spending is now one-third of the economy. As the private economy retreats, the importance of a new marketplace grows: the political marketplace. Products and services are no longer judged according to their usefulness to the economy at large–they’re judged according to whether or not they are politically useful or connected.
The political marketplace is the marketplace of crony capitalism. Its supply and demand are lobbying expenditures and the resulting federal program or carve out. Its actors are not firms, but the political class and the politicians they influence. This won’t be anything new to people who have been following Washington over the years, but I do want to talk about a textbook case of this–it’s called the Durbin Price Control and it affects regular Americans every day, whether they realize it or not. The Durbin Price Control is a price control on the fees retailers pay to banks whenever a consumer uses a debit card.
