It’s All About The Money

The Conference Board Review^® Article

By Charles M. Madigan

Free Lunch

How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill)

By David Cay Johnston

Portfolio, $24.95

Come the revolution, we will gather all the lawyers, all the very wealthy, all the sports-team owners (who are also, of course, the very wealthy), all the golf-course developers, all the businesspeople who build gigantic superstores on the outskirts, and all those developers who squeeze incentives out of local governments into a big, empty field outside of Anytown, U.S.A.

Then, in a painful revolutionary reaction that will represent both retribution and satisfaction for those of use who have toiled in the vineyards of life forever and still can't rub two damned nickels together, we will subject them to a punishment so severe that they will beg to swap it for waterboarding or, at least, being hit sharply by a person with a thin stick.

That's right: We will tax them.

We will tax their obscene profits and tax, retroactively, the benefits they garnered from local, state, and federal governments as they built their businesses. We will tax them for driving mom-and-popsters everywhere out of business. We will tax them for developing most-favored-nation status with individual members of Congress who sit on important committees. Tax, tax, tax to the point at which they kick off their Gucci loafers and head running into the woods just to get away from us.

We won't do any of this, of course, because we can't. If you want to cut to the heart of the message at the center of David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch, it is this: It's still a lot better to be filthy rich than to be anything else. Money always finds a way to transform itself into influence, and in the game of government, influence is what it's all about.

Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with lots of accolades, lives near Rochester, N.Y., two hundred miles away from Albany and four hundred from Washington, D.C. You would think a man with his kind of sensitivities would want the opportunity to finger-wag at state legislators until he faints, or to shout at congressmen until his head blows up.

He is that angry about influence peddling and how it plays out for the wealthy. I really like this book, and I think I would really like David Cay Johnston, too, because he seems so much like a muckraker — or, better yet, one of those determined reformers who set everything into motion at the beginning of the twentieth century. You might want to avoid him at a party because he could, no doubt, put you in a corner and lecture you for a couple of hours. I would love that, but people who are less obsessed with journalism or government might not.

I am adult enough, however, to recognize that some might not like this book much at all. Readers of TCB Review include robustly successful business folks who may well look at all these examples and say, "Well, that's business. You do what you can. It's not illegal." And you would be right. But by all rights, the excesses that Johnston presents should make the comfortable as angry as the rest of us. Perhaps they will. After all, some of the great reformers of American history have had too much money to count.

Free Lunch is a troubling book, but not for the reasons you might think. It troubles me because the scamming and influence-peddling and opportunism it recounts now seem woven into the fabric of government and how it works at many levels. From your local zoning board up to Congress, then over into the executive and judicial branches, it all seems so convenient if you are wealthy enough to figure out how to tap it.

The cases in this book are intriguing, then, but not surprising. Why am I not at all surprised that George Steinbrenner gets exactly what he wants, that the folks who cobbled together the plan for sporting-goods giant Cabela's Inc. found a way to sidestep taxes by putting fish tanks and stuffed game in retail outlets and calling them museums, that Chrysler had no trouble at all in shoving a little gas-station and car-repair guy into oblivion in Toledo so it could turn his shop into — what, a lawn? It's all here in enough abundance to draw gags from the good-government crowds and knowing smirks from the legions of lobbyists who know how to dance in the corridors of Capitol Hill and government buildings in Sacramento and Trenton and Austin and Indianapolis.

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