It's takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning

Glenn Reynolds on the moochers vs. suckers divide.

And an important point of Sykes’ book is that moocher-culture isn’t limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn’t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.

Plenty of the wealthy are doing the latter, and that has its own consequences, which are often worse than those stemming from goodies for the poor.

In a world of bailouts and crony capitalism - which is to say, in the world we live in today - a rational businessperson has to compare the return on investment between improving a product or service, or lobbying the government for goodies.

Frequently, the latter looks better: If you spend $1 million on lobbying, and get a $1 billion subsidy from the government, that’s a thousand-fold return on your money.

It’s hard to do one-hundredth as well through actual capitalism. So why bother to improve your products at all? Just hire more lobbyists.

Of course, the government can provide such rewards only because it has vast resources of coercive power, and vast stocks of other people’s money.

Deploying those resources for self-serving political purposes is nothing new, but - as Sykes points out in considerable detail - things are much worse now than they were during previous periods of excess.

He points out that the real problem is the fact that the US government operates well outside of the limits imposed by the constitution, giving it access to money and power is was never granted.