Government granted immortality

Posted by Marc Hodak on November 4, 2007 under Unintended consequences | Read the First Comment

Dale Carnegie once noted that no sound is as sweet to a person as their own name. Imagine having a building or road named after you. Very rich people have things named after them because they created them, as in a business or institute, or because they gave money that enabled their creation. Having something big named after you is a huge status prize, arguably one of the more expensive consumption goods in any society. It’s a great motivator to achieving the wealth to build such things.

It’s also a great motivator to building such things with other people’s money. Political leaders have been using taxes to build monuments to themselves for as long as civilization has existed. This tendency was, presumably, one of the more distasteful aspects of tyranny. It offended the sensibilities of our democratic forebears.

The edifice complex is a powerful one. Politicians have found ways to get their names on all sorts of public projects in their own lifetime. This is one of the rewards to being on a powerful Senate committee, for instance. The committee chairmen hold the purse strings for allocating billions of dollars of taxes, and few have resisted the opportunity to play Santa Claus with these funds, and to use the draw of tribute to wield this power or benefit from it.

Nobody has played this game as well as Senator Byrd of West Virginia. Byrd is the apotheosis of pork–a master of tax-funded narcissism. He even got around West Virginia state law by having a statue of himself erected in the state capitol. Even wealthy people who become Senators leverage their committee power into this personal benefit.

I know that all that pork doesn’t add up to much of a fraction of total government spending, especially at the federal level. But pork is the grease that enables the rest of the government spending machinery to operate so profligately. So, why not a constitutional amendment that prohibits any public project from being named after a politician, living or dead? That would take a away a huge incentive to tax us for things we may not really need, but for which some politician gets a largely private benefit. One might ask: Don’t certain politicians deserve recognition? Sure. But monuments can be, and often are, privately funded. That’s the difference between people choosing to show their respect for politician, and people being forced to pay tribute to a politician.

Tribute has always been an incentive to conquest, taxation, and enslavement. A free people is not forced to provide tribute.