But aren’t monopolies also infamous for reaping huge profits? The USG balance sheet is projected to show a loss of $1.08 trillion in 2020 and has been in the red for forty-six of the past fifty years.
USG is a terrible monopolist. Government is like a kid playing a game of Monopoly. The kid has hotels (in government it’s called “eminent domain”) on Boardwalk and Park Place and on all green, yellow, red, and orange properties. The kid owns (by way of the Departments of Transportation and Energy) the railroads and the utilities. And the kid has a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. (Note present and past presidential pardons.) Then what does the kid do? Spills an alphabet soup of federal regulatory agencies on the board; stomps on the top hat, wheelbarrow, race car, and Scottie dog tokens of free enterprise, and takes all the Federal Reserve Bank Monopoly Money and throws it out the playroom window.
No amount of entrepreneurial savvy can fix this game. The playroom’s been a mess since 1776. And no business wizard can spank the kid. The kid is the American public.
“Can government be run like a business?” Yes—a bad one.
Two, Four, Six, Eight Who Do We Appreciate . . . The Electoral College!
As we all learned in our civics class . . . or would have if we hadn’t been staring out the window, napping, or drawing toupees on pictures of President Eisenhower in the textbook . . . in an American presidential election voters actually do not vote for a presidential candidate. They vote for an “elector” who is pledged to vote for that candidate.
As per rules set down in the U.S. Constitution, the president of the United States is elected by an institution called the Electoral College.
The way this works—in simple terms, to keep us awake and not looking for photos of Ike to deface—is that each state gets electors in the Electoral College equal to the state’s number of congressional districts plus two (its number of senators). And the District of Columbia also gets three electors (because back in 1961 the residents of Washington, D.C., complained that they weren’t getting a say about the president even though the whole city is filled with people who won’t shut up about the president).
Thus the Electoral College has 538 electors. The presidential candidate who receives the majority of their votes becomes president.
Choosing electors in each state is mostly a matter of winner-take-all. The presidential candidate with the most votes in a state gets that state’s votes in the Electoral College. (Maine and Nebraska can split their electors according to who wins in which congressional district—but we’ll let the lobster mongers and corn shuckers worry about that.)
There is such a thing as a “faithless elector,” who doesn’t vote for the candidate to whom he or she is pledged. In the 2016 Electoral College proceedings Colin Powell received three votes and John Kasich, Ron Paul, Faith Spotted Eagle, and Bernie Sanders received one each.
Being a faithless elector is like committing adultery—against the law in some states and not in others. But, as with adultery, arrest and prosecution are rare. And in the history of American presidential elections Electoral College faithlessness has never led to any change in who became president (or, so far as we know, who slept around with Bernie Sanders).
The Electoral College is complex but its effect is simple: it gives the parts of America where people are thin on the ground greater say over who’s president than they’d have if only thick people were counted.
Before we discuss whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, first let’s not discuss the 2016 presidential election.
While it’s true that a certain person—who has insisted on constantly, repeatedly reminding us—won the “popular vote” (or not quite, since she got 48.2 percent), it’s also true that she was, as it were, trumped by another person in the Electoral College, 304 to 227.
But. The two of them knew the rules and campaigned accordingly. If they had been running to gain a majority of the popular vote instead of a majority of the Electoral College vote they would have conducted different campaigns.
Worse campaigns. Campaigns aimed at the lowest common denominator of voters—at the hoi polloi, the masses, the mob. Political thinkers have theorized that mob rule would create a society marked by selfishness, stupidity, instability, and a vicious tendency to scapegoat. Political thinkers can quit theorizing. Behold Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, WhatsApp, WhosApp, WheresApp, WhensApp, etc.
The 2016 presidential campaign was ugly but could have been uglier if both candidates had put even more emphasis on vulgar rabble-rousing and vast gatherings of fanatical adherents.
Picture, on the one hand, a gigantic Nuremberg Nerd Rally, camera ready for a lefty Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Hillary. And, on the other, a Red State Square with a parade of ballistic Trumps rolling through it, reviewed by a Trump Politburo atop Trump’s Tomb on Trump Day.
Right, there are two good reasons to keep the Electrical College. It forces our presidential candidates out into the boonies to be dragged from their private jets and comfy campaign buses at all hours and stuffed with starchy waffle mix at Rotary pancake breakfasts, smeared with canned tomato sauce at volunteer fire department spaghetti dinners, queried about local zoning ordinances by yokels in town halls, picketed (or endorsed) by special interests so special that no one has any interest in them, and otherwise made to behave like the small and inconsequential personages that our presidential candidates are.
We may—and we do—elect fools, but at least we elected them out in the open where we can see what they’re doing.
But what’s more important about the Electoral College is that it gives a vote not only to Americans but
