SPEAKING FREELY

What China shouldn't learn from the US
By James V DeLong

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Americans like to lecture China about concepts of government and political participation. Usually, these lectures assume that China should copy the United States, with particular attention to making the government more responsive to pressure from citizens and groups.

This is dubious advice, because the US itself is in a crisis over its political institutions, a crisis centered precisely on the ability of groups to pressure the government. This crisis is hobbling the ability of the US to deal with its long-term economic and social problems.

From a Chinese perspective, the details of US politics are of little interest, of course, but the US experience provides useful material for China's own political thinking and development, and the underlying issues are of great interest. The problem of ensuring that a government has adequate power to serve the welfare of the people while at the same time preventing its capture and exploitation by particular groups recurs through history. So the question is, where, when, and how did the US drift into error, and how does China avoid comparable problems?

As the adage says, the fish is the last to learn of the water, so the existence of this crisis is not seriously discussed in the US itself, and it has no name. This article calls it "the crisis of the special-interest state".

Textbooks on US government describe its various branches, such as legislatures, executive agencies, and courts. These are usually depicted as composed of disinterested public servants who are diligently trying to do their best for the nation. To some degree, this picture is true, as many officials are competent, dedicated, and fair. In the past, US governments and their officials have been capable of great things.

But US government has another side. Legislatures and agencies must be divided into smaller units and the power to act must be delegated to these subunits. As the number of areas in which the US government is involved has expanded, the number of subunits has grown as well, with each exercising substantial power over some part of the economy or society. As a result, much of US politics now consists of efforts by private interests to capture these subunits and exercise their power.

These efforts are highly successful, and the result is the "special-interest state". In this model, various subunits of government are "owned" by particular interests. The Department of Labor serves labor union officials, not productive industry as a whole, or all workers, or even union members in general. The Commerce Department is devoted to business, and mostly to big rather than small business. Educational institutions dominate the Department of Education, which fosters a model of education based on 19th-century principles that serves teachers and administrators, not students or society. Environmental advocates control the Environmental Protection Agency, ratcheting up the stringency of environmental rules without regard to overall costs and benefits.

In Congress, dozens of separate committees guard their jurisdiction fiercely, collecting campaign contributions from people in the private sector who are under their jurisdiction and creating winners and losers in the economy. Nothing is too large for their control: the housing industry and its recent disasters were the result of a generation of economically unsound government policies adopted at the behest of special-interests. And nothing is too small: it is common for a law to require the federal government to pay for some minor facility, such as a bridge or a roller skating park, in a village thousands of miles from Washington.

Even the courts are subject to special-interest capture, as judges are appointed because of their membership in some particular group or interest, and are expected to decide cases in accord with its views.

These captured agencies do not simply channel money to their constituencies. They have great power to issue regulations that enrich their supporters at the expense of the public, or to transfer resources from one group of people to another, and they make wide use of this power.

Many American political scientists glorify the special-interest state, sometimes calling it "interest group liberalism". They urge it on other nations as a model.

Whatever its merits in the past, when the number of interest groups was small, the US special-interest state has become dysfunctional. Over the past half-century, thousands of groups have been organized. They represent industries, and sub-industries, and sub-sub-industries. They represent a multitude of social causes, every possible variety of environmental protection, religious views, ethnic groups, and any other category that one can think of.

They have succeeded too well, and almost every area of US government policy has become a maze of incoherent and conflicting policies and rules. The old interests will ensure that no program can ever be abolished, and no old rule repealed, so new interests must continually find new areas of the private economy to take over, which leads to the formation of yet more new groups that must defend themselves and so on in an endless chain. The special-interest state is continually expanding its control.

This expansion cannot continue forever, so it must eventually stop. How and when this will happen is uncertain, though. The American people know that something has gone awry and grow angry, but the political class - public officials, lawyers, lobbyists, journalists - do well out of the current arrangements and resist change. Change will require a crisis, perhaps the current one, perhaps a future one.

In the meantime, Chinese analysts have a rare opportunity for study. Learning from one's mistakes is a good thing, but learning from the mistakes of others is even better.

James V DeLong is VP and Senior Analyst, Convergence Law Institute, USA. jdelong@convergencelaw.com, For more information, see The Coming of the Fourth American Republic, The American (April 21, 2009).

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

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