The New Road to Serfdom Read Online Free PDF Page B

Today’s MPs have the opposite: responsibility without power. Ceasing to be authoritative, they have become contemptible.
    The extent to which voters despise their politicians was brutally exposed in 2009 by the Westminster expenses crisis. I won’t bore you with full details of the scandal: This is, after all, a book about American, notBritish, politics. To cut a long story short, a journalistic enquiry under a newly passed Freedom of Information Act required the House of Commons to publish details of every expense claim submitted by MPs. Some of the claims were outrageous. Most were not. The so-called Additional Costs Allowance had been set up to allow MPs from constituencies outside London to maintain a second home in the capital, and most of the receipts were for everyday household items: food, furniture, and so on.
    Such was the mood of the country, though, that no one was especially minded to distinguish between the legitimate and the illegitimate claims. The MPs who had behaved scandalously—stretching the definition of their “main” residence, for example—were treated in exactly the same way as those who had behaved within the spirit and letter of the rules. The revelation that someone had claimed for a sofa or a frying pan was treated as an abominable scandal. Why? Because the affair wasn’t really about expenses. It was about a much deeper-rooted sense that politicians had become parasitical. As long as MPs were unable to deliver meaningful improvements in their constituents’ lives,
any
claim they submitted was resented, be it large or small, extravagant or modest.
    Of course, the fact that there was such a fuss—the story dominated the front pages for six months—suggested that, in Britain at least, people felt that theyought to look up to the House of Commons. They were angry because they felt let down by an institution that, deep down, they wanted to respect. In most of Europe, voters are beyond that stage. My Continental colleagues in the European Parliament simply couldn’t grasp what the fuss was about. A French friend made me explain it to him three times, and then remarked. “So: the money was for furniture, and the MPs spent it on furniture.
Et alors?”
An Italian MEP told me that, in his country, something didn’t become a scandal unless it involved mafia links, briefcases full of banknotes, and, ideally, an assassination or two.
    __________
    Are American politicians more virtuous than their European counterparts? No. Is corruption unknown in Washington? No. The difference between the two systems has to do, not with the integrity of the practitioners, but with location of sovereignty.
    America’s Founding Fathers were determined, above all, to prevent the concentration of power. They knew firsthand where such concentration led, and had spent years fighting the consequences. As Thomas Jefferson put it:
    I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of allthe powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth.
    The framers of the Constitution in general, and Jefferson’s followers in particular, were determined to diffuse power, to constrain those in authority, to ensure that decision-makers could never stop looking over their shoulders at those they purported to represent. And, by and large, they succeeded.
    American political institutions have developed according to what we might loosely call Jeffersonian principles: the belief that the concentration of power leads to malfeasance; that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect; and that decision-makers, wherever practicable, should be answerable through the ballot box.
    In consequence, contemporary Americans enjoy a series of unusual, sometimes unique, Jeffersonian institutions: states’ rights,