You're Being Gamed

Column: Are we living in the Hunger Games?: "Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O'Rourke famously observed: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." But it's not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It's a cold calculation: You're likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.

I'm not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, "There aren't tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn't seem like a sign of national health that America's political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they're supposed to serve.""

Du'O. RTWT.