Flow Control
I rarely agree with Investors Business Daily when it comes to policy, but there are those rare moments when they write a policy piece about finance and manage to raise an interesting point. While ostensibly criticizingSenator McCain’s push for lobbying reform, the anonymous editorialists at IBD point out that the root cause of legislative corruption is not the lobbyists per se but the unaccountable control we give our congress in the form of power of the purse. Recently there has been much movement on term limits (more thoughts later) but that solution is not cut and dry. While anti-Federalists might argue that this is what you get when you concentrate that much power in a central government - this argument runs into trouble when you weight the beneficial reforms that elected representatives can accomplish when they work together. We should spend more time as a country - one decreasingly satisfied with our elected representatives - discussing how to reform our aging and tenured legislature.