Of Washington and the Life of the Nation

Washington, D.C., is a strange place.  I speak from experience.  My whole working career has been in Washington.  In many meetings with people visiting Washington I have explained to them that Washington is not America.  Few have been surprised by the remark.  In many visits away from Washington (and in connection with my work I accept nearly every invitation to leave town and be among those whose lives too many in Washington try to run) I am ever and powerfully reminded how different the rest of America is from Washington.  I have not been surprised.  Kansas City is much closer to America than Washington ever was or will be. 

In support of the point I offer a few painful examples.  I see one each day that I drive into the city.  Looking at the cars around me I note that very few are more than a few years old.  At the same time I am impressed by how many of the cars are foreign luxury models.  It is typical, when paused at a stop light, to notice that many of the surrounding cars are BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus, Acuras, Audis, and not an insignificant number of Jaguars, high end Range Rovers, and Porsches.  I also see a lot more Prius cars and other hybrids.  This is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with driving any of these or any other late model high-priced cars.  I merely note it as very different from what I see when paused at a typical traffic light in other cities and towns in America.

As an aside, I am grateful to the people who buy and drive a Prius or other model of hybrid, because they subsidize my purchase of gasoline.  Their cars do use less gasoline (though not enough less to compensate their owners for paying so much more for their cars), leaving more for people like me who drive regular gasoline-consuming vehicles.  That reduction in gasoline demand helps reduce the price. 

The Prius drivers might be offended were I to tell them, however, that I am entirely unimpressed by their conspicuous token of environmental sensitivity. Their purchase and operation of a Prius, after all, is very likely more harmful to the environment than is my more conventional automobile.  First of all, they pay $10,000 or more extra to buy their hybrid, and if the price system works at all efficiently that means that making a Prius or other hybrid consumes far more in resources than making a conventional car.  Second, the hybrid car fans and their coteries in the D.C. area have convinced the masters of the highway networks to create special less-traveled commuter lanes that the hybrid drivers are permitted to use, meaning that they reduce the efficiency of the highway infrastructure.  So, to the Prius drivers of the world I say, thanks for the subsidy, but save your enviro lectures for when you are looking in the mirror.

The automobiles of the nation’s capital region are a sign of an even more painful reality of how Washington is different from the rest of America.  It is also the wealthiest part of the nation, by far.  On April 25, 2013, Forbes magazine published an article about the richest counties in the United States in terms of average income (Tom Van Riper, “America’s Richest Counties”).  Six of the ten richest counties are in the Washington, D.C. region, including the top two and one more out of the top five.  While recession lingers in the rest of the nation, Washington and its suburbs are doing rather well, with unemployment down to 5.5%, well below the national average.

I will also say that I am not opposed to wealth and wealthy people.  I wish all of the world to be wealthier and rejoice that it is far wealthier today than people of just a few generations ago could have dreamed.  But we could all live so much better still.  I ache that the policies of governments around the world stifle economic growth and development and hold so many of their people down in poverty.  The poor nations of the world are not poor because their people are less talented and intelligent than others, but because their governments are so oppressive and have been for generations.

Therein lies my beef with the wealth of Washington and its environs and the key to its estrangement from America.  That wealth is hard to explain from the perspective of value added to the rest of the nation.  Washington is basically a one-company town.  Unlike other one-company towns, however, it produces little that adds enough value to the lives of others that would allow it to prosper in open competition in free markets.  The product of Washington instead is forced upon the rest of the nation, whose productive income is confiscated to keep the Washington wealth-eating machine going. 

Try to name an economic product or activity that is not somehow subject to special handling by or permission from someone in Washington or controlled from Washington.  After the Dodd-Frank Act, for example, all financial activities have become more subject to direction by Washington bureaucrats than ever before.  Today, a bank has to pay more attention to its regulators than it does to its customers.  Who gets the best attention out of that arrangement?  The same is true for energy producers, communications firms, health care providers, and you can continue the list.  All that special handling comes with a toll, payable in taxes, or borrowed from the financial markets, or layered upon private incentive and individual initiative.  Today in Washington the most convincing argument for new rules and laws is to announce that something is “unregulated.”  When you regulate liberty, how much liberty survives?  How much of America survives? 

Next year, 2014, will mark the 200^th anniversary of the burning of Washington by the British in the War of 1812.  The curious thing about the burning of Washington was that it did not make a lick of difference.  The rest of the nation went on about its business, little harmed or even affected.  The same was true during the Revolutionary War when the British occupied Philadelphia.  Rather than end the war it did nothing to bring the British victory.  In America the nation was not run by its government, and in fact government was mostly irrelevant to the daily life of the people.  That was very different from European experience, where nations were so dominated by their rulers that capturing the capital was tantamount to beheading the country.

Washington is strange to America.  That can be tolerable, but only if it is smaller and less significant.  Let the real nation draw its life from the people and live where they live their lives without direction from their rulers.  Let us have a Washington whose disappearance would not mean much to the rest of the nation.