Why, asks the MacIver Institute, “is the government lobbying the government?”
MacIver calls itself Wisconsin’s “free-market voice.” It is a privately funded outfit that makes the case for less government in the Badger State. It has to earn its funds from donors who can, at any moment, stop donating money.
One of the things the MacIver Institute found itself up against are other think-tanks and apparently donor-funded organizations advocating for more government in the state, for more programs, bigger programs, and more taxes to feed all the great new stuff.
And it turns out that several of these advocacy organizations are themselves funded by government! I mean, taxpayers.
I know, it’s not unheard of. It’s too common, existing in probably every state of the union.
And it is thoroughly corrupt.
The MacIver Institute identifies three outfits that receive tax money to promote more tax-funded programs: the Wisconsin Counties Association, the Wisconsin Towns Association and the Wisconsin League of Municipalities. These outfits promote more transportation funding and higher taxes. Comparing these outfits’ core pitch to “a swindler selling gullible buyers submerged swampland,” MacIver makes it quite clear how easily local leaders are bamboozled: “Your supervisors — at least many of them — are clueless that they are being used as patsies in a coordinated scheme by a taxpayer-funded lobbying machine, one that exists not to represent the public, but to represent government itself.”
People who want fewer government services and a smaller tax burden often wonder why government size always ratchets up, never down. Well, this is one reason: the government takes your money to give to groups that will push for more government.
Sadly, this ratchet racket is a part of government that works too well.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
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