Ryan Avent waxes indignant:

One of the thing that continues to surprise me about Washington, though it shouldn’t, is the extent to which those involved in the policymaking process think in terms of interests—almost exclusively. This is a direct reflection of the outsized influence interests have over the policymaking process (“the people” tend not to get all that involved), and it’s therefore easily understandable, but it’s also pretty pernicious. A politics that seeks to balance interests will consistently give short shrift to the goal of societal good.

Nothing new under the sun here, really, but a somewhat different way of looking at this is in terms of the missing interest group—poor people.

There’s an extensive political science literature on how campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures don’t make nearly as much of a difference in determining policy outcomes as people often believe. But if you probe this literature a little bit, I think what it’s actually saying is that these factors matter overwhelmingly, so overwhelmingly that the only items that make it onto the public agenda are ones that feature a rough balance of money and lobbying clout. That means that if you want to do something that’s helpful to low-income people—something like the Affordable Care Act—the only way to do it is to structure it as something that’s very helpful to a subset of business interests. Well-intentioned politicians can and do shape this dynamic in a way that’s more helpful to the little guy, but they don’t fundamentally alter the dynamic.

And you see much the same thing on the recession response side. TARP really did, in my view, provide economic benefits to working class Americans via the mechanism of helping large banks. But it’s telling—extremely telling—that this mechanism is the only one that’s been able to attract substantial political support.

Yet another Randall O’Toole blog post hosted by the Cato Institute that bafflingly fails to acknowledge any government role in promoting the usage of private automobiles.

But in addition to the obvious point that the government builds and operates the roads that cars drive on (just like the dread transit!), the “choice” of what mode of transportation to take is systematically structured by public policy. Square footage of housing and office space is quite expensive in most of the walkable, transit-oriented places in the United States but there are large regulatory impediments to building most such places. Indeed, parking regulations often mean that the physical structures of existing walkable neighborhoods are illegal to replace. Now naturally if you make a rule that low-density facilities with lots of parking spaces are the only kinds of places people can build, then everyone will “choose” to live and work in such places and then “choose” to drive around them.

What’s incredibly frustrating about this is that if Cato wanted to make an argument that progressives should be more open to free market thinking, the realm of transportation and urban planning offers a lot of good examples. But instead of giving us those examples, they give us a lot of Randall O’Toole—a walking, talking example of why you often can’t take free market political rhetoric seriously.