Legal Commentary

Is it just me, or is the New York Times' normal self-satisfaction about the rightness of its politics becoming even less self-critical than usual? I find myself provoked to such irascibility by what strikes me as an insufferably smug and snotty front-page piece implicitly criticizing Alaskan Republicans for taking the federal dollar while criticizing federal spending. "Alaskans tend to live with their contradictions in these recessionary times," chortles Michael Powell, criticizing as "cognitive dissonance" the fact that "[m]ore and more Alaskans, particularly of the Republican stripe, identify the federal government and pork-barrel spending as the enemy, although Alaska was built by both."

There is an obvious rejoinder to the implicit accusation of hypocrisy. All states, including Alaska, face a collective action problem in turning down federal spending to reduce the deficit. Such self-abnegation on the part of one state does not prevent others from feeding at the trough -- in part, with the "virtuous" state's tax dollars. Without some mechanism for obtaining a credible commitment from other states' federal representatives that they, too, will forego federal money, even a state politician who despises high federal spending will seek federal grants. Moreover, if one is over-represented in the Senate (as is Alaska), then one will tend to be over-represented in federal spending -- again, because ones' Senators are competing with other over-represented states (Wyoming, Vermont, Montana, etc) who cannot, absent any mechanism of credible commitment, turn down federal money that they fear will otherwise go to their over-represented sister states.

In short, states are locked in a "prisoner's dilemma" game in which each must grab as much federal boodle as possible in fear that their sister states are going to grab as much federal boodle as possible. The federal budget is a commons that everyone loots because, tragically, everyone has no choice absent some means of credibly committing not to loot. The solution is not virtue but some mechanism of credible commitment: Candidates include (a) strong political parties that can force or tempt individual congresspersons to sacrifice revenue in return for the party's endorsement and campaign funds or (b) constitutional restrictions on federal spending for "local" projects. Andrew Jackson used both mechanisms in his Maysville Road veto message of 1830, and the Democrats were consequently able to avoid spending on internal improvements for the roughly twenty-two years in which they held power before the Civil War.

Why cannot Michael Powell, the author of this egregious Times piece, see that there is a difference between being a hypocrite and being a chump? I suspect that Powell's intellectual laziness stems from the usual source: NYT readers are so complacent about their own politics that any cheap shots at Republicans and Tea-Party types get an easy pass. But perhaps I am being overly charitable, and Times writers are just not very sharp. Either way, this sort of thing -- along with a lousy sports section -- is enough to make one cancel one's subscription (or vent in a blog post).