I break no new ground by asserting that politicians tend to listen more intently to the concerns of special interests than those of average taxpayers.
That doesn’t mean politicians are evil or unprincipled. As Stephen Slivinski explains in his book Buck Wild (Nelson Current, 2006), the taxpayers’ “complaints are rarely loud enough to break through the cocoon of noise created by the swarms of special interest groups defending their pet programs.”
Slivinski explains why the beneficiary of government largesse has a stronger incentive than the taxpayer has to lobby politicians.
Think about, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts. The grants budget of this program is $47.4 million. That’s about 0.01% of income taxes. Now imagine the calculation from the point of view of an average NEA grant recipient. The NEA awarded 1,970 grants in 2004, and the average grant that year was $24,000. A single artist, museum, or theater might have gotten more or less than this, but in any case you can see how much more a grant recipient has at stake than you do as a taxpayer.
So, while the elimination of the NEA would likely only get you back much less than a penny of every dollar you paid in income taxes, the average grant recipient would lose the entire $24,000. The grant recipient has a substantially larger incentive to get the attention of Congress — by hiring a lobbyist, testifying in front of a committee, and otherwise trying to infuence the decisions of policymakers — than you do as a lone taxpayer.
Repeat this process for hundreds of agencies and programs, and you’ll understand the daunting task that faces advocates of limited government.
