Can we end Legislative Collusion?

First, what's with the focus on earmarks?  You would have thought that after Obama crushed McCain in the debates on this one the right would finally realize that the size of earmarks means they're not the core problem.  Complaining about budget insanity makes perfect sense; talking about earmarks in particular is just a nervous twitch that you on the right should probably grow out of.  If someone tomorrow said "fine - you win,  earmarks get zeroed" we wouldn't be better off.  Too many useful things get funded with earmarks; they're used by politicians to get personal credit for worthwhile local projects, as well as junk.

Big-ticket items are a bigger problem than earmarks.  Take a look at the Dept of Defense - there's a vast farm of porkers there along with our actual defense needs.  Just go down the list on big-ticket last-war items in all the services.  But Congresscritters are _proud_ of this kind of thing.  They go home to the voters beaming with happiness waving flags and blabbering about "country first" when they really mean "Lockheed first."  And they'd be more than happy to sign their names next to these sorts of absurd spending problems.

It's good to see activists cottoning on to the concept that representative democracy and the people's control of their government has been lost. The implications of that reality are that the real corruption is more profound than just pork.

Anyone who has participated in the political process knows just how insulated the political class is from the real concerns and preferences of the general public. Perhaps insulated isn't the right word here - indifferent may be better.

The political class know very well what constits think and want, but those things are basically a joke to them.* The tools of political manipulation are so evolved and ingrained, including using the instruments of big government for that purpose, that the politicians and hacks don't need to care what constits want and believe. It's all a game that they take completely for granted - they think this is the way the world is and the way it is supposed to be.

So what does the political class care about? Themselves, of course - getting and keeping  positions where they can keep their mouths firmly affixed to the teat of government "service" with all the material, social and psychological (vanity) rewards that flow from it; avoiding the necessity of ever having to get a job in the private sector where accountability is direct and concrete, and one must provide actual value to survive. In short, where one must earn a living.

This class is the real enemy, and it's a wholly bipartisan racket.

If the fundamental problem is a political class that has escaped the people's control, and this is a wholly bipartisan phenomenon, then for those whose goal is restroring limited, represantative government just getting Repubs back into power won't fix anything.

IOW, parties are part of the problem, not the solution, but we the people may be able to do an end-around on them. In a subsequent post Patrick writes something that hints at a way out: "(Dean)  showed that one could not only augment but supplant a traditional political organization using online tools. This lesson has since been learned by the likes of Ron Paul... and by the President-elect of the United States."

~~~

Given all this, it can be seen that pork, logrolling and similar corruptions of the legislative process (including their pernicious secondary effects) are just minor byproducts of a much deeper problem. Related, for most members of the political class accumulating great wealth is not their primary motivation - cash-in-the-freezer type cupidity and corruption are the exception, not the rule. So that to is not the real problem vexing us.

*I'm not referring here to the ignorance and cognitive dissonance that is people wanting mutually exclusive things, like "cheap gas and forcing GM to build 'green cars';" rather I'm referring to more fundamental concerns and desires.