Glenn Reynolds finds additional evidence that our political class is dysfunctional. Sadly, such evidence seems all too easy to come by.
Incoherence in energy policy and other areas stems in part from paying attention to polls. Even if every individual person had a coherent view of the subject matter—a plainly counterfactual assumption!—the collection of majority views might turn out to be incoherent.
But I think there’s a deeper reason, one that underlies dysfunctional behavior on the part of our politicians in many areas. They refuse to recognize that the policies they enact (or, in some cases, even discuss) affect incentives. So, they systematically ignore the effects of what they do. And that leads them to ignore the interactions between their various policies. They don’t see the incoherence of their positions because they never relate them to each other. (Lower prices would lead to greater demand and greater energy usage? Who’d have thought?)
UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Instapundit readers!
I think you’ve confused tail and dog.
The political class is just the tail being wagged by big business.
Congratulations on your first Instalanche, Philo!
C Smith has it wrong. Dem and GOP politicians are not anybody’s pawns. Instead, they’re all of our FOOLS! They are not competent to be pawns.
“You get the government you deserve.”
You’re probably onto something here, but I would go beyond polls and attribute it to a “reliance on the media”. I read the Boston Globe on a regular basis, and I’m always tickled by the obvious lack of irony whenever the Globe puts a front-page article about high gasoline prices next to one about, say, alternative energy.
It’s certainly the case that polls can be misleading, even wrong. It’s not hard to imagine a special-interest group polling over and over again until they get the result that they want, which is all you ever see. Imagine if and when the media becomes a special interest group, it can just cherry-pick the poll results that it likes, and you’ll never hear of the others.
Thanks, TW. Actually, it’s the fourth!
Pink Pig, you may well be right. The mainstream media doesn’t believe in incentives either, so their policy preferences are often incoherent. I’m not sure about the direction of causation. Undoubtedly they influence politicians and the public. Politicians and the public also influence them. They all fail to understand the ways in which policy affects incentives. Why? That deserves a post in itself.
C Smith, I think you’re sometimes right. Interest groups, including big business, have a large influence on policy for a mixture of good and bad reasons. If big business manipulated politicians at will, however, then policy would be coherent to the extent that the interests of big business were coherent. But it strikes me as much less coherent. If big business were in the driver’s seat, for example, you’d expect Congress to authorize drilling in ANWR and offshore, not to be threatening windfall profits taxes.
Gary, you raise an interesting point. Politicians ignore incentives partly because they’re economically illiterate.
From one conservative professor (adjunct at this point) to abnother, great blog. I’ll add you to my blogroll.
Actually, the political class does believe in incentives. What they get wrong consistently is that the public’s response can be, and often is, quite different than the response that they (the political class) desire.
So, they’ll happily pass laws providing insufficient incentives for something that they want, and be surprised when the response is underwhelming, and also pass laws that they don’t want people to respond to (such as changes in tax rates) and again be surprised.
At some level, they do see that their wish is not our desire and pork is something of a response to this.
After all, pork recipients tend to behave as expected.
Another example of this dysfunctionality in energy policy is the irrational legislative burdens placed on making widely available nuclear power. Having made it impossible to construct the most efficient, “green,” eco-friendly source of power, and by default enforcing the use of fossil fuels, congress now responds to the [surprising] development that fossil fuel use has a deleterious effect on the environment, by raising the alarm, and enacting restrictions against its use.
So, energy companies ask Congress, “Please let us construct more nuclear power plants. They’re good for an environment damaged by burning fossil fuels.”
Congress: “You may not. You must burn fossil fuels. And by the way, we’ll hold you responsible for any damages caused by burning fossil fuels, because we’re enviro-friendly.”
Pauly,
I completely agree. I almost wrote about nuclear power in this post. The anti-nuclear movement has been our largest obstacle to environmental and energy-independence goals over the past forty years. This isn’t just hindsight; I ran a pro-nuclear power debate case in high school back in 1971!