We are less than two weeks from the midterm elections. Many Americans have high hopes that we will elect people who will lead us to a brighter future. My hopes are more modest. I just hope they don’t mess things up too much.
Am I being too pessimistic? I guess it all depends on what your particular expectations for Congress are. Our country faces complex issues and formidable challenges. What special qualifications will the 535 people we elect to the House and Senate have to solve those problems?
The members of the next Congress are bound to have a similar profile to that of the current Congress. Our elected representatives present a cross-section of American society. Members may be doctors, lawyers, military veterans, businesspersons, educators, etc. They may also include political opportunists who never made a mark in the private sector before discovering that they could make a lucrative living out of telling other people how unfair our country is and how they would be their Santa Claus.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that, collectively speaking, Congress includes many highly accomplished individuals and that (on average at least) they are more intelligent than a random sample of 535 Americans. But does that give them the ability to make wise decisions? The present Congress appropriated several hundred billion dollars to subsidize computer chip manufacturing. What qualifies those members of Congress to decide which industries should be subsidized and by how much? The doctors and lawyers in Congress may be smart individuals, but what special knowledge do they have about computers (or about green energy—another chosen recipient of congressional largess this year)?
Food
Multiple threats to the global food supply have become apparent this year—everything from the war in Ukraine to governments in countries such as Sri Lanka, Canada, and The Netherlands (the second leading exporter of agricultural goods in the world after the USA) throttling back food production in pursuit of the anti-human ESG agenda to an ominous confluence of droughts and poor crop yields.Water
The only natural resource that rivals food in importance to human life is water, both for human consumption and for agricultural production. Does government manage water well? Not really, when you consider the environmentalist zealotry that results in California channeling water into the Pacific Ocean to preserve a fish called the delta smelt—water that is desperately needed by drought-stricken California food-growers. (There we go again: less food at a time of increasing need for food.)Energy
The typical American citizen knows that having reliable, affordable supplies of energy is crucial to human life. Energy is the great multiplier of human strength that has powered the unprecedented economic growth of the last two or three centuries. Yet against this backdrop we have the stunning spectacle of Biden and his party striving mightily to deny us access to fossil fuels, leaving American consumers scrambling to cope with higher utility bills and gasoline prices.Politicians’ Skill Set
If government can’t manage food, water, and energy policies wisely, what makes so many voters believe that politicians can intelligently manage, fix, plan, or control our economy benignly? Whatever skills they may have demonstrated in the private sector, neither the new nor the old members of Congress will be equipped with the wisdom to solve major problems, devise economically rational economic plans, or even to simply take care of us. (Of course, our founders never expected Uncle Sam to take care of us. The federal government was supposed to keep us free and let private citizens direct private property to the meeting of human needs. But that’s another story.)Did you ever ponder how members of Congress decide how much money goes to which special interests? It’s not a matter of wisdom or enlightened reason, but of responding to political pressures and incentives. Lobbyists bend their ears, contribute to their campaign treasuries, and persuade them that federal dollars would be better spent supporting the lobbyists’ causes than the causes of other potential cronies (er, I mean recipients) of federal aid. That is how Washington operates today.
By all means, vote. Some candidates are clearly better (or in some cases, less bad) than others. But the best we can hope for from the new Congress is that it not be quite as profligate in dispensing taxpayer dollars to special interests as the present Congress has been.