WE, the insiders and us

I don’t actually think Justin Trudeau decided to have the WE Charity administer a $900-million summer volunteering program for young people because it once paid his wife $1,500 to speak to one of its gatherings. I’ve often spoken to groups and received an honorarium of $1,500, sometimes even more, and I’ve never felt owned as a result. After cashing the cheque, I’d always take their calls but, being reasonably well brought up, I’d take their calls anyway.

Now if the amount were $250,000, which is what Mr. Trudeau’s mother made over the years speaking at various WE events, that might be different. But my income and wealth are nowhere near Trudeau levels. Michael Jordan, asked in the recent ESPN documentary Last Dance whether betting tens of thousands of dollars on golf games didn’t mean he had a gambling problem, tried tactfully to explain that for him $10K is chump change. The rich are different from you and me: they do have more money.

Margaret Trudeau speaks and appears for a living and seems to do well at it. (There really is no accounting for taste.) WE presumably is just one of a number of steady-paying relationships for her. No son of Pierre Trudeau could be so stupid as to risk his career by directing a near-billion-dollar contract to a group simply because they’d been nice to his mother.

Impure and simple corruption of the cash-in-a-bag, youpay-me-you-get-the-contract kind obviously does take place. People went to jail for it in the sponsorship scandal and for bribes on construction contracts in Libya and a new hospital in Montreal. But, like most citizens of rich countries, Canadians believe it’s a relatively rare thing.

GOVERNMENTS END UP DIVERTING MONEY AND OTHER RESOURCES TO GROUPS THEY ARE SIMPATICO WITH.

What is not rare is the more genteel but still unfair corruption of camaraderie and common interests. The Trudeaus and the Kielburgers evidently like each other, respect each other’s achievements, share common attitudes and goals and believe in the virtue of getting progressive things done. (Progressive isn’t the problem here. It wouldn’t be better if they wanted conservative things done.) When a need began to be perceived to help out young people unlikely to get summer jobs during a pandemic it was hardly shocking that they somehow managed to find each other (though don’t expect the showboating questioning of a parliamentary committee to get to the bottom of exactly how). Motivationally-aligned, culturally-attuned minds think alike.

When I’ve written that industrial policy, in which government and industry “work together” to discover and finance worthily “strategic” projects of various kinds, is bound to encourage corruption, some readers have thought I’m referring to illicit Swiss bank accounts and cash-filled New York safe deposit boxes. But by far the more common form of corruption is this mutuality of backgrounds, interests, outlooks and connections.

For a number of years I attended conferences of one kind or another in Ottawa (sometimes because people paid me $1,500 to speak). It always struck me what a friendly little community the ministers, deputy ministers and private-sector government-relations people were. Away from the microphones, at least, they were often on a first-name basis. They had all gone to the same schools — except sometimes the minister, who could be from a humbler background, democracy being funny that way. Their kids played in the same hockey leagues. They tended to dress alike. Whatever was the trendy style for eyeglass frames at the time, they all adopted. They read the same newspapers (often not this one, alas). On many things, not surprisingly, they thought alike. Everyone wasn’t quite one big happy family — they did sometimes disagree on policy issues — but they all seemed to share the same goals and tendencies.

Often it seemed they were family. Not a literal family. Not a mafia “famiglia.” Not quite, to use a phrase from this country’s history, a “family compact.” But one thing they clearly had in common: they were all capital-I insiders.

Another trait they obviously shared was that they were human beings. My social science is economics, not psychology. But in my experience, insiders getting together in coalitions of common interests, helping out people they like who think as they do, seems a human trait. In the end, this kind of informal community of interests can be quite powerful. It’s not surprising, then, that governments end up diverting money and other resources to groups they are simpatico with.

Faced with this stubbornly inbred insider syndrome, you have a choice. You can try to police it by creating internal checks, including arm’s-length audits and full transparency so those in the press who haven’t also become insiders can expose mutually profitable chumminess.

Or you can decide you want more resources allocated by markets rather than by the political processes that, because people are people, are so prone to insider corruption.

Which is a main reason many conservatives prefer market processes.

Being on the inside is, of course, almost a definition of privilege. You would think, given the current aversion to privilege, that more people eventually will be coming around to conservatism and markets.