I’ve seen it a million times. A government bureaucracy doesn’t get the amount of loot for its budget as is on its wish list, so it plays the “Washington Monument Syndrome” game. Don’t give the police or teachers’ unions a huge raise, and they stop all policing and the teachers strike. Don’t give the government’s air traffic controllers the 40 percent raise they ask for during a recession, and they go on strike and shut down all air traffic, as they did in the first months of the Reagan administration. Reduce the number of members of the PGA (Professional Gropers Association), a.k.a. TSA bureaucrats, and they create a traveling nightmare on purpose for hundreds of thousands of air travelers.
The tactic is always the same: Do everything you can to make the public suffer, counting on the fact that many of them will complain to their congressmen and instruct them to give the bureaucrats what they want. It’s called the “Washington Monument Syndrome” because the head of the National Park Service shut down the Washington Monument, the most popular tourist attraction in DC, in 1965 after Congress refused to give him his pie-in-the-sky budget request. It worked like a charm, as tourists from all 50 states complained bitterly to their congressional representatives about how THEY ruined their summer vacations.
No private enterprise can blackmail the public like this. If corporation X threw this kind of bureaucratic hissy fit, consumers would just patronize corporations Y and Z (and many others). Problem solved. In the private competitive sector one succeeds by developing talents and abilities in actually serving others — customers. In government, one succeeds by developing talents and abilities in lying, manipulating, conniving, bullying, and looting the public. Statist political science professors (pretty much the only kind these days) call it (politics) “the art of persuasion.”
6:13 pm on May 19, 2016
