THE PROFESSOR WHO TOOK A HARD LOOK AT POLITICIANS

Author: By David B. Wilson, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, January 6, 1987
Page: 11
Section: OP-ED PAGE

George Mason University, for heaven's sake? According to the World Almanac, there is such an institution. It is in Fairfax, Va. Fairfax is, appropriately, just west of the famous Washington Beltway, which is said to be the boundary of the capital's political-bureaucrat ic-media ghetto. The almanac says that George Mason University has more than 17,000 students, which makes it a little bigger than Harvard. George Mason, a state institution, will be 30 years old this year; Harvard will be 351.

Mason (1725-'92), you may remember, was the author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, a sensible document that did not insist that all men were created equal, but rather that they were by nature equally free and independent. Men, Mason wrote, have inherent rights of life, liberty and "the means of possessing and acquiring property, and pursuing happiness and safety."

Thomas Jefferson, of course, rewrote Mason in the Declaration of Independence; and while the Jeffersonian version is more widely recognized and rhetorically superior, it is considerably more troublesome and less explicit.

But back to James Buchanan, the professor who won the Nobel for demonstrating that politicians and bureaucrats act in their own self-interest just the way everybody else does.

You would think that such an observation would be, in Jefferson's words, self-evident. But, no. Politicians and bureaucrats and their associated advocates pretend that they are different. They act, they say, only in the public interest or to promote the general welfare or to redress injustices or as agents of providence or history or from some other purportedly altruistic, excruciatingly sanctimonious motivation.

Journalists, as often as not, are their accomplices. In this scam, they write and publish what the politicians, bureaucrats and advocates make available to them as though it were all for real, even when the journalists know better. As the nation approaches the season of State of the State and State of the Union addresses and budget messages, it might be useful to try to explain how things really work.

Take the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is spending approximately $10 billion this fiscal year and will almost certainly spend more in fiscal 1988, which begins July 1.

The $10 billion consists of money exacted from the citizens by taxation or collected from the federal government, which gets the money from the same victims. The $10 billion is "up-front" money -- that is, it is disposable cash; it is not borrowed, and it does not have to be paid back. Some of it is spent to pay the costs of borrowing.

The people who run the government and their various apologists regard whatever they have to spend as either woefully or grossly inadequate, phraseology familiar to the most casual reader of this newspaper. The frequency of use arises from the practical utility of the language.

If appropriations and spending are "woefully inadequate," the cheapskate taxpayers are at fault for not having provided more money, the bureaucrats and legislators are excused for their manifest failures of performance, and
pressure is generated for increasing expenditures, borrowing money and raising taxes.

That this approach directly serves the power, purposes and prosperity of the public sector and its dependents in the securities business, education, human services and highway construction is obvious. Nobody with any practical, inside experience of government understands the matter differently.

People with practical, inside experience of government know that the interest of the insiders is in increasing both the size of the fiscal pie and the size of the individual insider's piece of it. That is what it is all about: Who gets what and how much.

An important point: Every expenditure creates its own intensely involved constituency. Not until recently, thanks to Citizens for Limited Taxation, has it been possible in Massachusetts to assemble a constituency for the control of taxing and spending. And CLT had to bypass the people's "representatives" on Beacon Hill to get the job done.

Here is democracy's greatest flaw. In any close primary fight, the firefighters or the veterans or the public health nuts, say, are, once aroused, marginally enough to defeat most incumbents. It's safer for the insider to go along.

Perhaps, as his critics complain, professor Buchanan has just been pointing out the obvious. On the other hand, he must have done so with scholarship sufficiently elegant to impress the Nobel Committee. George Mason, both the patriot and the university, should be very proud.

WILSON;12/29 NKELLY;01/07,10:12 WILSON06