THERE ARE PRINCIPLES, AND THEN THERE IS PUBLIC CHOICE. Or perhaps there is pork. Betsy's Page is correct to suggest that "pork" is too cute a term (as is "log-rolling," the term of art I understand to describe the "grease" she identifies as the necessary evil to obtain sufficient votes to get something out of the conference committee and approved by both chambers.) There is, however, discontent all around the 'Net with this sort of business as usual, which public choice theory suggests is rational behavior on the part of legislators motivated to demonstrate their effectiveness to constituents as a way of getting re-elected. The transportation bill that passed the House just before the hurricanes, and the rent-seeking of hurricane zone politicians looking for others to make that part of the world better than it was before is fueling the discontent. Herewith Coyote Blog.

The Republicans are lost. Combine this kind of spending with their Patriot Act and Sarbabes-Oxley driven Big-Borther-Is-Watching intrusiveness, luke-warm committment to free-trade, and bizarre obsession with pornography, and I find nothing at all attractive about the party. Only the economic insanity of the opposition party continues to keep Republicans in power.

Mahablog arrives at the same conclusion, only from a different start line.

Note, if you don't know: Liberalism is not and never was about tax raises, and profligate spending. Rather, it is about effective government that meets the needs of We, the People, and taxes that are adequate to pay for what We, the People, ask it to do.

Well, no. Tax raises (on somebody else) and profligate spending (to log-roll the bills through and to get re-elected) are the quintessence of public choice. That's true even if Harry Hopkins summed up the New Deal as "We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect" and Ronald Reagan later hung that on "liberalism." Liberalism, as structured by the Welfare Economics Paradigm, favors the use of government policies as the preferred method of providing some services that We, The People ask for. Conservatism, which takes more of a transaction costs approach to thinking about policy, suggests that sometimes government is less effective at meeting needs than some other institutional arrangement, including highly distributed technology and emergent networks beyond the ability of a technocrat to arrange.