David Brooks Argues That Government Has Been Captured by Special Interests

David Brooks argues that Americans like liberal ideas but they don't trust government as the instrument. He admits that republicans are venal and embarrassing. They make government look bad and then they run their elections against government. He calls on democrats to fix government so that the public will trust government to implement liberal ideals.

It looks like Brooks, and his conservative colleague George Will, have found a new weapon. George Stigler at the University of Chicago made a similar argument against government regulation. Stigler correctly pointed out that government regulators were often captured by the industries that they were supposed to regulate. We saw this in the financial crisis. Government regulators failed to do their job and we saw what happened. It does not follow, however, that the solution is to end any attempt to regulate industry. We need to take actions that will enable regulators to do their job.

Brooks and Will accurately describe some of the factors that have led many to believe that government has been captured by special interests. If government has been captured, it makes no sense to depend upon government to remedy our problems. A state captured by special interests is worse than no state at all. That raises the question of where we would be if there were no government to defend the public interest. We would be worse off than we are now. There would be no way to control the rent seeking activities of special interests.

Brooks proposes that the democrats should take the responsibility for cleansing government and restoring the public trust in government. He realizes, however, that the democrats would need republicans to cooperate with them in order to make government work. In other words, he has given them an impossible task. Republicans have opposed all democratic initiatives to make government work. One of their leaders, John McCain, co-sponsored a bill with a democrat to limit the influence of special interests in the funding of election campaigns. He was nominated by his party to run against Obama in the last election, but he had to overcome strong resistance within the party due to his sponsorship of campaign finance reform. The republican party is totally opposed to campaign finance reform that would limit the role of special interests.

David Brooks and George Will are perfectly happy to see that the public believes that government has been captured by special interests. They are unwilling, however, to deal with the role of their party in assuring that special interests can proceed with the capture of government. They are happy to place the burden on the democrats, and to blame them for not cleaning it up. David Brooks, for example, has been one of the leaders in the Charter School movement. The movement is predicated on the premise that for-profit private industry can do a better job than the public schools. Shrinking the role of government and expanding the influence of profit seeking industries is the primary objective of conservatives. David Brooks and George Will have the responsibility for convincing better educated Americans to support conservative causes. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and countless others, have the job of selling conservative dogma to those who are unfamiliar with big words.