Professor Lessig's New Quest

I have long admired the work of Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig. He has written carefully and forcefully on the issues of intellectual property. As a public intellectual he has also worked hard to improve the situation, especially as it relates to copyright law.

He recently announced a new quest defined thusly - he wants to think and write about corruption - "Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars." This change in focus was announced on his own blog in a thoughtful essay. I wrote a response which is republished below.


Professor Lessig, while I appreciate your efforts and hope they are successful, I am not sure I understand the scope or direction of your future work. The nature of the political process is one where interests clash. But there are also opportunities, as your colleague who was once at Stanford Anne Kreuger suggested, for rent seeking. As long as government is in the business of transferring resources from one source to another, rents are created. I suspect part of your solution will not be to reduce the influence which government exerts over Americans.

Why is Gore particularly exempt from the "shill" charge you raise - even on the issue of global warming? Was the Kyoto protocol a serious effort to respond to a problem or a set of ill-conceived political decisions which would do little to reduce the effects of the problem? From my view, a lot of the discussion of responses to global warming are not that at all but rather attempts to move rents from one side to another.

The concern that I have is that one person's corruption is another's legitimate source of political or substantive disagreement. In many cases the issues we try to deal with in the public sector are poorly defined which allows many to step in and adjust results inappropriately.

Does that mean we should allow all of the egregious activities that we have seen in the process, even after the enactment of a series of political reform (i.e. Anti corruption) acts? Of course not. But definitions are key here.

The possibilities for unintended consequences are substantial. For example, in the name of reducing corruption we changed the way political contributions are collected by reducing the amount that most individuals could offer in support. No sane person would suggest that we have made the process of running for office any less corrupt. Indeed, most observers suggest that the concentration on fund raising has become if anything more corrupting. When presidential candidates need to raise money in $1000 increments they spend a lot more time doing it. The Hsus of the world (bundlers) become more important.

As one guide look at the history of the municipal reform movements at the turn of the 20th Century. In California it was led by Hiram Johnson and the Progressives. Many of the reforms of that era (the Initiative, Referendum and Recall) were created to reduce corruption. And yet when one looks at how many initiatives are created and advanced they look pretty corrupt. Ditto for the reforms adopted by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research.

The caution here, based on my own 35 years of working in and around the political process, argues for clarity of definition and a lot of skepticism of purity of motives of ALL players in the process. From my academic work the best place to start is from the rich literature of Public Choice Economics.