If Only Our Right to Vote Was As Powerful As Our Right to Spend a Dollar

When is the last time you were extremely satisfied with how the federal government handled something? If you're like me, it's been awhile. I'm almost always satisfied with services and/or products I receive from private companies and it's not uncommon for me to have absolutely no complaints when I spend my hard earned money. Yet, that same level of satisfaction is harder to come by when doing business with the government. There's a variety of reasons for that, probably the biggest being that the government's incentive to provide exceptional service is fairly low-why should they? Ignoring politics for now, the federal government is in no danger of going out of business. The officials managing.. well, almost anything backed by the federal government.. know that if their level of service is subpar, they may get reprimanded or even lose their jobs but their organization is in no danger of going out of business. If a federally backed organization loses money the taxpayers will just subsidize the losses. Services that don't compete with the private sector have even less incentive to please its customers. Consider the IRS: why should they provide good service? If you refuse to deal with them, you go to jail. There's no personal profit incentive; the service is provided because lawmakers say the service is required. So what incentive does the government have? Officials want to stay in power; they want your votes.

Imagine a government whose sole purpose is to maintain roads. I guarantee in that situation you would find the roads impeccable. If the party in power (yep, bringing in the politics factor now) ever did a poor job of maintaining the roads they would immediately be voted out. Now imagine that government expands to also provide law enforcement. If they let a few roads fall into disrepair here and there, voters would complain.... BUT they might not vote the party out if they're providing stellar law enforcement. On average, 50% of a person's decision on whom to vote for is theoretically based on road maintenance while the remainder is based on law enforcement. See where I'm going with this? The more services a government provides, the further diluted a person's vote is. Voters tend to overlook smaller issues and vote based on what's more important to them. The government becomes less answerable to voters for each single issue as it adds more services. Why should the party in power worry about satisfying people on smaller issues when everyone is focused on major issues? They have an incentive to make sure the government provides a level of service high enough to placate people equal to the value that the average voter places on that particular service relative to all other services the government provides. If you don't like the service FedEx gives you, you're going to take your money elsewhere. You only have 1 vote, are you really going to vote somebody out of office because the post office lost your letter? Not likely. This leads me to a concern I have for our nation.

We've seen over the past year and a half or so (beginning with the Bush administration) an expansion of the federal government unprecedented in post FDR history. This has led to an equally unprecedented increase in federal spending. President Obama has greatly accelerated this trend. Sure, some of this expansion may have been necessary to deal with the economy in its current state, but that is a claim that can and will be debated for quite some time. Now, it's looking increasingly likely that we'll see a level of governmental involvement in our healthcare that has never before been seen in our nation's history. Putting politics aside, how much more does this dilute our vote? Will concerns for the state of our education system get a backseat to the state of our healthcare system in future votes? Sure, there is a good argument for the fact that not much will change because government inaction also spurs people to vote. People will vote at their dissatisfaction at the government for NOT regulating or providing a particular service. Still, the more involved the government gets in our lives, the lower the incentive the government has to provide quality service in any particular category and the more disillusioned voters become.

Now, you have a constituency that is dissatisfied with their government. People were dissatisfied with Republican leadership and decisively voted them out of office. Now, most people are dissatisfied with Democratic leadership, evident in the fact that even the senate seat in Massachusetts, usually an easy win for Democrats, has a real chance of going to the Republican contender in this Tuesday's special election. That state has not elected a Republican to the senate since well before I was born. Approval ratings for the current health bill are lower than Bush's approval ratings when he left office. With our nation's two party system, we may be seeing the start of a trend where voters have no choice but to just keep voting the party in power out of office until someone finally gets it right. The fact that our last two presidents (Bush & Obama) blatantly ignore(d) public opinion polls when setting policy only makes things worse (though there is an argument for presidents who do what they think is right; we do elect them to office to make decisions more so than to follow opinion polls).

If Republicans return to power in the next couple elections, it will not be because people want Republican leadership - it will be that they don't want Democratic leadership, the reverse of what happened in 2008. This trend can only get worse if the government continues to expand; it increases the likelihood that people will be dissatisfied with something the government is doing. More people will lose trust in our government and will become disillusioned with politics. In turn, the government has even less incentive to focus on what's important and to give people a reason to vote for a particular party - they only have to wait for the other party to mess things up (or just to convince people to blame that party for something that would have happened anyway). A lot of this is theoretical and based purely on my opinions and ideas, but it's still worth pondering. If only our right to vote was as powerful and influential as our right to spend a dollar.

Oh, and happy belated new year.