It's a lot of fun to be generous with other people's money
Many of our elected officials believe that government's role is to be benefactor to the poor. It is easy to justify that helping others is a good thing - even if with someone else's money. Some people really do suffer; they do need help. For this reason most of the newly elected, (even if they weren't already socialists) tend to drift leftward as soon as the congressional doors open to them and eventually, they actually start to believe that wealth redistribution is the right thing to do. They begin to buy into the rhetoric that justice and fairness has nothing to do with rewarding the productive or allowing the indolent to suffer the consequences of their lack of it, but everything to do with equalizing results.
Bringing home the pork, buying votes, wealth redistribution, increasing or creating government programs and jobs, encouraging the enlarging of the beneficiary citizen base who support him, results in re-election and power maintenance to those in command. It is very logical for him, but it interferes directly with our personal ambitions. It takes our money, time and sacrifice to achieve his goals. He must necessarily negatively impact our ability to provide for our families in order to continue to provide for his own at the level to which he has become accustomed. This process removes money from the private sector. This money would have otherwise resulted in the creation of lean and well-managed private jobs, and growth. Instead it places it under governmental control for their own beneficiaries, jobs and increased growth.
Some might ask: "What difference does it make whether one works for the government or a private company? A job is a job." It isn't as simple as trading a private job for a government job. We may sacrifice two or three or many more private sector jobs for a single government beneficiary job because of the inherent cost, inefficiency and lack of accountability.
Unlike the private sector, unless government takes ownership of assets as they do in communist regimes, it doesn't have the ability to generate revenue in order to pay for the jobs it "creates". They must extract money from the individual through confiscatory taxation to spend it publicly. The only source of government money is through confiscation. They must tax private sector production, thereby limiting its ability to produce. Borrowing it for current public appropriation only means we will be billed (taxed) later to satisfy the debt.
Each government job is funded with private tax dollars. Removing workers from the private sector to place in government positions naturally leads to lower private sector production and revenues. This necessarily leads to lower government tax revenue. Fewer workers translate directly to lower production. Fewer men make fewer widgets. Fewer widgets produced results in lower corporate sales.
Given the same tax rate, lower corporate sales results in company earnings decline, which in turn leads to lower taxes paid. To maintain the government jobs they've created, they must now increase taxes on the reduced earnings of the remaining private sector, eventually bankrupting us all in favor of themselves. Dumb isn't it? Like a hungry snake swallowing his tail and continuing to gorge.
In order for government to grow, the private sector and the revenues earned must necessarily shrink. There is an undeniable inverse relationship. So - these lawmakers must directly interfere with our ability to accomplish our goals in order to achieve theirs. Our objectives then are in direct conflict with those of our lawmakers. They are more than a little different; they are completely diametrically opposed.
This is not meant to promote anarchy. Despite its faults, most of us understand the need for some government. How much is enough? Maybe we don't have the answer to that exactly, but we do know that what we have now is far too much. We have to somehow limit its scope and power.
We know how it happened, but what do we do? Can we vote for the right guy and return us to sanity?
One lone legislator, (or even several acting together) refusing to participate in pork projects, spouting freedom, lower taxes, waste in government, self-reliance or the destructiveness of over-regulation, can't do it. First, he doesn't normally get elected by promising to reduce benefits to the dependent class, so he has little to offer the large block of voters who support the candidate who promises the most from the public treasury.
If by chance he does somehow receive enough votes to gain office, he almost certainly is not re-elected because he can't get enough of the others to agree with him to make a difference. The result is he is ineffective and so unable to do virtually anything to directly benefit his own taxpaying constituents.
By standing firm on these conservative issues, and refusing to compromise his old school work ethic and personal responsibility and property rights beliefs - he loses the next election in a landslide. Congressmen don't often behave with fiscal restraint because it is in direct conflict with their own personal goals - which is of course to stay there.
Next: Conflicts of Interest