Political bribery comes in multiple forms
“If you eat your spinach, you can have ice cream for dessert.”
This is what we humorously call a “parental bribe.” It consists, however, of the essential element that defines a bribe: It is a reward offered to influence or procure a desired outcome.
So broad a definition allows us to call almost any behavioral inducement a bribe. For example, we could say that Muhlenberg College offered me a bribe
— a salary — to teach economics classes. More narrowly, a bribe can be legally defined.
I should like, instead, to limit my focus to political acts, which I shall jocularly call “bribes,” that offer rewards to some potential voters and may influence their voting preferences in favor of one party, Democratic or Republican, over the other. The political act likely has avowed purposes other than influencing voting behavior, but that influencing effect is always taken into consideration.
Let’s consider this form of political bribery and the circumstances that may make it effective.
In Colonial times, whiskey was sometimes provided by candidates for public office as a way to “buy” votes. We no longer encounter such obvious inducements to secure votes. Indeed, they are illegal.
Two recent examples of actions influencing voter behavior may be instructively considered.
Some 20 years ago the George W. Bush administration placed tariffs on the imports of some steel products. The stated purpose of those tariffs was to protect American steelworkers’ jobs from unfair competition from abroad.
Certainly, no one would claim that Bush was bribing steelworkers to vote Republican. But it would be naive to think that voter reaction to the tariffs was not taken into account.
The 2002 steel tariffs illustrate what is needed for a political bribe (remember, we are using the term jocularly) to be effective.
First, the beneficiaries of the bribe must be clearly defined.
The reward to individuals in the defined group must be significant and fully recognized by the recipients; steelworkers, instead of being laid off, would retain high paying jobs.
And, of overwhelming importance, the cost of giving the reward must be widely distributed and not readily discernible. The cost of preserving a single steelworker job was then estimated to be about $500,000 (more recently, the Washington Post reported a cost of $900,000 for preserving or creating a job under the Trump adminstration tariffs).
This cost to consumers was reflected in the resulting higher prices of products, such as automobiles, refrigerators and kitchen knives, that used steel. But did you ever pause and think that the price you paid for your automobile or paring knife was higher than it might have been because a steelworker’s job was preserved? You may have noticed the higher price, but likely not its cause.
Paul Muschick writes regularly and well for this newspaper. Recently, he wrote a Town Square piece titled, “I’m torn over Biden’s student loan forgiveness” (Sept. 2). It well illustrates, in that particular context, some of the conflicts and fallacies in appraising political bribes.
Muschick notes, “As a parent with one son in college and another a few years away, my glass is half full.” He recognizes the financial benefits that will flow to him if his son’s college loan is forgiven. Yet he worries that the loan forgiveness proposal will “cost between $469 billion to $519 billion over a decade.”
Muschick might have also mentioned that the proposal may be unfair to those who have paid off their college loans, have avoided incurring indebtedness by choosing to go to a less-expensive college (eattending a community college, for example, rather than an expensive liberal arts institution) or have not chosen, or were financially unable, to attend a college or university.
In passing, it might be noted that the Biden loan forgiveness proposal is now on hold, subject to further judicial review.
Here again, we see that a bribe may win additional votes when the beneficiaries, indebted college graduates, receive a significant reward and the high cost of the proposal is dispersed over a large taxpayer base, with each individual taxpayer incurring, without obvious assignment, only a small increase in his or her taxes.
We do not know whether Paul Muschick and his soon-to-graduate son had their voting behavior influenced by the bribe. Indeed, it did not require a heroic act to refuse the bribe. Political bribes can only be probabilistically evaluated as to their effectiveness.
I found Paul Muschick’s piece a thoughtful consideration of the possible conflict between self-interest and the public good. I was, however, disappointed with his final observations.
I find those observations representative of one of the most insidious, commonly encountered and dangerously misleading of political arguments. Having conceded that student debt forgiveness may be bad policy, he goes on to enumerate many other instances of bad policy which “unfairly” rewarded one group at the expense of another.
Loosely paraphrasing, he concludes, Yeah, it’s bad policy, but there are lots of other bad policies. Or, as he specifically writes, “I ... am not going to lose any sleep over it.”
In evaluating any policy proposal, don’t excuse one bribe by citing the many others politicians have already used to influence voting behavior. More generally, take each policy on its own merits or deficiencies. And, just maybe, you should lose some sleep over it!