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http://www.news-sentinel.com/opinion/your-voice/guest_column_lets_hear_it_for_obstinancy_20170724&profile=1049
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Monday, July 24, 2017 08:26 am
Bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out. “
— George Carlin
It is predictable that when political division is greatest, as it is this week in the U.S. Senate on the issue of healthcare, the calls for compromise are strongest. And this is the time, also and incongruously, when the vilifying and name-calling is loudest.
Locally the division more often is prompted by tax-funded economic development or grandiose quality-of-place projects. “We need to sit down and iron this out,” the Chamber types tell us, and if we don’t we are a nay-sayer, recalcitrant; we are blocking progress, we are anathema.
It is understandable to shy away, to keep your thoughts to yourself. But you are assuming that all sides mean well, that they simply hold sincere differences of opinions, mere wrinkles in the freshly laundered fabric of our public discourse.
That is a lazy assumption. It ignores the reality that political careerists have turned democratic representation into an abstract. I have seen vector analysis of the relationship between special-interest political donations and municipal contracts in a typical Indiana mayoral campaign. It leaves you wondering if there is an honest personal conviction left in the process.
Clearly, we no longer send people to Indianapolis or Washington as friends and neighbors whose values and judgement we share and trust. Rather, we send them as lawyers to cut us a deal, to manage a fix, to expand our influence and advance their careers.
But imagine you have a valid insurance claim. Would you be happy if your attorney, working on a flat fee, negotiated an out-of-court settlement for half of what a judge or jury would have awarded? You might feel compromised, but not in a good way. In politics, it happens every day.
That is what many office-holders mean when they say they are “fighting” for us. What it really means is that the public debate is about power masked as public policy. Moral conviction, the rule of law and even the truth are mere details. Multi-tiered votes allow an office-holder to later claim the full range of positions on a given issue. This is not policy discussion, it is game theory.
The offer to compromise, then, is specious, as when a chess player offers to trade “even up” a castle for a queen. Many times in the last decade politicians have advised us that for progress’s sake we had better accept — to compromise with — policies that are either untestable or downright suspicious and in any case drive down individual initiative.
What they would have us “iron out” is the differences that independent economists have with their self-serving approach, specifically the idea that growth can only be achieved through an institutional authority — them.
Do they truly believe what they say? Some do, the ones who have never been taught about Adam Smith. For a good number of the rest, though, it is posture and mimic; they have something to gain — and the community be damned, beginning with its middle class.
We have fought this fight before. It is worth fighting again. For after taxes and regulations, all we have left is an assurance that our exceptionalism is due to an emphasis on the primacy of the individual in addressing public concerns.
We would be fools to compromise that away for fear someone might call us a name.
Craig Ladwig is editor of the Indiana Policy Review.
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