From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Well, our connection was made by James Madison.

Yes, that James Madison, roughly 250 years ago.

Madison wrote, quote, if men were angels, no government would be necessary in framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men.

The great difficulty lies in this.

You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

A dependance on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government.

But experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

End quote.

Alfred University president Mark Zupan referenced that quote for a recent op ed for the Democrat and Chronicle.

And I'm thinking about that Madison warning about the need for auxiliary precautions.

What exactly does it mean?

There?

Madison seems to be warning us to guard against flawed men and women who would use government to enrich themselves, the rest of us be damned.

As Zupan writes that story is on full display in The Downfall of Venezuela, for example.

The World Affairs Council's Rochester chapter has invited Mark Zupan to talk about this issue for their February meeting.

Japan is the author of Inside Job How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest, and he knows a thing or two about how insiders can rig systems.

And he's generous enough for this time to come back and talk to us, the president of Salford University.

Mark, welcome back to the progra Adam, thank you for the opportunity.

Your book, Inside Job How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest, is 7 or 8 years old now.

Why did you decide to write it when you did?

Always been fascinated.

I started off actually in college, interested in being pre-med, and first year discovered I didn't like the sight of blood.

So that kind of ruled out that field.

And then I'm the son of immigrants, so the dream then was to maybe get into politics, give back to the country in that way.

I worked for a congressional representative from central Ohio.

But the more I discovered about that, that didn't seem to be the right path.

Had a one and started off switching then in college to political science, but fascinating.

Fascinated with history and political science, and had a great mentor, though in economics, and ended up finally majoring in economics and getting a PhD in that field.

So, have been looking to apply the economic model to the political marketplace.

And so it's been a long fascination.

Did my, undergrad, basically dissertation on, looking at, explaining behavior in the U.S.

Senate, what motivates that?

To what extent senators respond to the interests of their constituents?

And, anyway, I've just been following it.

And there's a fair bit of research then, as a faculty member at USC and in Arizona and and then had the opportunity to write, write the book when I was at Simon at the University of Rochester back in 2014 to 2016.

So just as a brief diversion and maybe we'll come back to this later, but just because you brought it up here, I mean, a lot of Americans are under the impression that, for example, U.S.

senator.

So you raise the idea of researching the Senate.

Do senators tend to vote based on the interest of their political donors?

If people have looked at that and, there's some evidence to that effect, but more here in general is the economic model.

And it's about 60 years old.

The first one to really conceptualize it was an economist at the University of Chicago, George Stigler.

And, Freud was preoccupied with sex.

Economists were preoccupied with the interest, motivate people at marketplaces.

So the way economists like me look at politics is it's a marketplace.

And on the supply side, or either the rulers, the bureaucrats, the elected officials, the public officials more broadly, and on the demand side are special interests that would the, the currency or what's traded in the political marketplace is wealth transfers.

People on the supply side, the elected officials, like senators, have the ability to make policy changes.

Bureaucrats can make regulatory changes that influence, wealth outcomes for interest groups on the demand side.

And when Stigler first wrote about this, very much in response to the New Deal legislation, University of Chicago was fairly right wing critical of government intervention during the New Deal, and he came to a similar conclusion that, Karl Marx, somebody on the opposite side of the, ideological spectrum had come to decades before that the system would get would get co-opted primarily by producers.

In the Marxist case, it was the capitals, and it Stigler saw too many cases with New Deal legislation because firms were more concentrated, could more effectively lobby the de you know, seated in the political arena with the elected officials and got favorable rulings that, benefited them at the expense of consumers.

But then what started happening in the 70s is we saw legislation like the EPA, or invite and order, consumer products, regulations that didn't seem to fit with producers, benefiting.

That seemed to also indicate other interest groups could at times move the system in their direction.

And and Stigler had a fellow economist, Chicago Simplesmente, who posited that it was a multi group capture system.

The different interest groups could compete on the demand side to get through regulatory changes from elected officials on the supply side, so was in college.

My mentor had started looking at this, at oil legislation, and we decided to look together at the Surface mining, Reclamation Act of 1977, where we would look at how senators voted on this legislation and to what extent did their voting patterns reflect how coal consumers, energy consumers, how, their interests were represented in the state, how surface coal miners, their interests in a particular state, environmental groups.

And the surprising thing is, when you looked at all of these different interest groups and tried to develop this refined measures, they explained some of the senatorial voting, but the dominant driver was more the ideologies of the senators.

And it was amazing to what extent you could predict how a senator voted on how on strip mining legislation based on how he or she voted on something like abortion or gun control.

And so we started thinking back, or maybe on a particular issue like, strip mining, you don't have as much ability to influence a senators vote, but what you could do is make sure you put the right ideology into office.

So when we vote for senators every six years or House of Representatives every two years, we've got to pick people that come in bundles.

And so you want to select the ideologues that almost lean in your direction during the course of their tenure.

But even there, once we looked at the interests that influence which ideologues get put into office, there was still a fair bit of slack.

And a Democrat in a democracy like ours, for individual senators or individual members of the House, to vote their conscience.

And, and people have vastly different at the time, we were looking at somebody like an Orrin Hatch versus a Ted Kennedy could be on vastly different sides of the ideological spectrum.

But their personal beliefs, on particular pieces of legislation, still, they still had a great deal of latitude.

And then we got into what the implications of that are and then started thinking, you know, not just in democracies, but, could the the insights also be applied more broadly because until 200 years ago, autocracies were the norm?

Yeah.

And so, forgive me then for the diversion on the Senate, but let's kind of maybe peel back and do a little bit definition here.

So your book's title is how government insiders subvert the public interest.

And that's what you're not only writing about in regards to Venezuela, which we're going to talk about, but that's part of the subject you're going to bring to the World Affairs Council.

How do you define what is a government insider?

What's the definition there?

It can be anywhere from a king or queen, a monarch, it can be bureaucrats, a military, public officials, elected officials.

And if we were thinking about this topic and put that a little bit back up, a little bit, the way the economic model first got developed, where governments broke down the last 60 years, the focus was on the demand side.

Interest groups, whether it's one percenters, environmentalists, consumer advocates, producers that they would co-opt the system at the expense of the general public interest.

But if we'd looked at this issue 200 years ago, when autocracies were the norm, the focus would be much more on the supply side that, where countries run aground is where the rulers have made decisions or have either pursued their in kleptocratic, for kleptocratic means, for their own benefit or for their ideal.

The biggest trainwrecks, would argue have occurred were the ideological interests, whether it's, Stalin or, Mao or Pol Pot, that you want to impose a particular worldview and political, offices or unique places in terms of being able to promote your own worldview.

And, let me share a quote.

There's an 18th century German Romantic poet, Friedrich Alderton, who said was what has made the state hell on earth has been precisely because individuals have tried to make it to heaven.

And so what?

What's central to the book is let's not these folks on the supply side when whenever there is a crime committed, investigators, look who has the motive, the means and the opportunity.

Folks on the supply side have all three.

And so we can't neglect when things break down in countries like Venezuela or in other parts of the world.

And this problem applies not just to autocracies, but to democracies like ours.

I promise we'll get to Venezuela coming up here.

But I have to and forgive me, audience I'm going to read something that's kind of lengthy, but it's one of the more extraordinary things I've read in months.

Read it this weekend.

The author of what I'm about to read is Andy McCarthy.

He is a longtime writer for the National Review, and the National Review is not a never Trump publication.

They've got some writers who are not Trump fans.

McCarthy is probably one of them now, but this is a very conservative publication, and McCarthy is a contributing editor at National Review.

He's a former chief assistant U.S.

attorney.

He's an attorney himself, and he's no fan of Democrats.

I want to read what McCarthy wrote about the way the US federal government has been used to benefit insiders this weekend, quote, before we get into the gory details, it is worth observing that at National Review, we extensively covered the Biden family business of corruptly profiteering off Joe Biden's political power and influence.

So did congressional Republicans.

Indeed, three investigative committees spent hundreds of hours gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses and threatening to hold President Biden's son, Hunter, in contempt.

House Republicans even opened an impeachment inquiry, which generated a scathing report on the conspiracy to monetize Joe Biden's Office of Public Trust to enrich the Biden family.

The sum generated over several years of Biden's self-dealing was over $27 million.

That number flashed a neon throughout the report's 291 pages, $27 million.

Republicans were especially incensed because the Bidens practiced their harlotry on foreigners, in particular agents of China family avarice rather than the national interest, drove United States government policy, the House impeachment report thundered.

Any quotes from the House impeachment report?

Now, Joe Biden has exhibited conduct and taken actions that the founders sought to guard against in drafting the impeachment provisions in the Constitution.

Abuse of power, foreign entanglements, corruption and obstruction of investigations into these matters.

The committee's investigative work has revealed that the Biden family, with the full knowledge and cooperation of President Biden, has engaged in a global influence peddling racket from which they made millions of dollars.

So here's what McCarthy says next.

You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business?

You'd have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements and corruption alleged in the report.

To get near what Trump has raked in just from the United Arab Emirates.

Of course, Trump can't be faulted for obstructing congressional investigations because there haven't been any.

Comber is busy tangling with the Clintons.

The better to take the Epstein heat off a president whose poll numbers have declined as this year's midterm elections beckon.

Now that self-dealing has achieved heights so astronomical that $27 million would barely be a rounding error.

Republicans have lost interest.

The lid was blown off the sordid Trump UAE story by a blockbuster Wall Street Journal report last week.

But then we'd already learned about President Trump's shocking pardon of Zhao after Zhao helped orchestrate the UI's $2 billion purchase of the Trump Crypto enterprises start up stablecoin.

And thanks to prior Wall Street Journal reporting, we also know that Zhao had contributed by finance expertise to help left crypto infrastructure.

End quote.

This is part of a five part series that Andy McCarthy is writing about corruption in the Trump administration.

This is a longtime Republican conservative attorney who was one of the most merciless critics of the Biden administration in the Biden family.

And he says what we're seeing now dwarfs what happened with the Biden administration.

As an outsider now, you're not the insider, Mark.

Do you agree with what you heard there?

I think it's a very legitimate worry.

And I wrote the book, before I knew I'd become a university president.

I, wading into politics.

It's a difficult task when you're a university president.

You want to be unbiased, impartial.

But I do believe there's an important issue to still tackle.

And it spans political lines.

And the same thing that, and it's striking looking at the book when I was writing at 2014, 2015, President Trump doesn't get much mention more emphasis at the time on Rubio and the Clinton family, and how much the Clintons were making on speaking fees with ties to particular companies and some of Marco Rubio's, connections and, and benefits to the family from particular supporters.

It'd be a much longer book is the best way to put it.

If I had to do now a second edition and it's in terms of adding a couple of zeros to the equation, I think is spot on.

And all the more reason for important institutional checks and balances.

Peggy Noonan had a marvelous piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend bemoaning what's happening in the Washington Post and the important role journalism played.

And she cites this famous quote from Thomas Jefferson that if he had to choose, he'd rather have the media without government than the government without media.

So having people shine a light on what's going on, the same way with the violin when in his cohort, when he revealed this billion dollar palace that Putin had built on the Black Sea for himself, and with all the lavish accouterments, so these are important issues to be raised.

And, what's made this country successful is effective checks and balances, and we still have it within our power.

And we got to remain mindful.

We can't take it for granted.

But because it's worked reasonably well, for, for the last, 250 years that are will continue to work.

So let me hit two aspects of that.

And it's based on some of the debate I heard.

I try not to watch a whole lot of cable news.

It's bad for my brain in my head.

But, you know, sometimes I lapse into it.

Mark.

And there was a, I mean, I conservative his name and feel like the correct word here because I don't really know what that means in the modern context, but there was a, a Trump supporting commentator who was saying essentially, so what what Andy McCarthy is writing about, every president makes a ton of money when they leave the white House.

He talked about Barack Obama getting paid $400,000 a pop to go speak at Wall Street, talk about what the Clintons got paid, as you do in your book.

And this commentator was saying, they all make money.

They make a ton of money.

So who cares if you do it when you're in office or not in office?

Trump is a businessman.

He knows how to leverage his office.

He's going to make money now.

He's going to make money in the future.

What do we care when that's happening?

What's the big deal?

I want to get your take on that first, this notion of is there a difference between profiting now versus profiting in the future?

And I'm also curious to know if you do find if there should be limits.

I mean, like Barack Obama might say, this is the free market right now.

This is what this group wants to pay me to come speak.

Am I not supposed to take it?

What does Mark Zupan say?

And I think there are ways there are less pernicious ways, especially when you're no longer in office.

But when you remain in office.

For example, suing the IRS for loss of $10 billion when you've appointed the head of the IRS.

And, it just, there aren't appropriate checks and balances if that's allowed to proceed.

So if you can dip into the till, the, what it does in terms of trust, it erodes trust in terms of promoting rent seeking, that if I realize with this person in power, if I get close to him or her, if people will spend money on covering favor as opposed to doing productive activity.

So it's more dangerous when that, activities pursued by people in office, I would argue than than after office.

And it is true that, in it again, that spans the aisle, to the Republican House speakers, Dennis Hastert, it was a teacher and a wrestling coach before he ran for Congress.

Ended up becoming a multimillionaire.

You can trace some of the connections that he made that allowed that to happen.

Newt Gingrich, all the speaking fees that he generated.

So it spans both sides of the aisle.

But I would argue strongly it's more pernicious when and at the magnitude, because, it starts to erode the culture of and it starts to set a bad example for how other people behave in their society.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I hope it's obvious to almost everybody listening that there's a huge difference between if you get paid to give speaking fees after you're the president versus if you're trying to make $2 billion on a crypto deal with foreign interest in the first year of a presidency, I would hope that that's obvious.

But there's this nihilism that seems to be building up the.

And I'm going to read an email to you here, Mark, and see why writes and says so.

All I'm hearing is that Trump is better at making money than other corrupt politicians.

But that's capitalism, right?

Whoever makes the most money wins.

I mean, I understand the nihilism that is, I think, reflected in this email, but I reject it and I think it's dangerous.

I think there is a difference in and I think that's partially what McCarthy is trying to do in the National Review, which is to say, we should not accept corruption of any kind, but we are at a different level and it is not all the same.

So how do you start differentiating when it's truly dangerous or when into the level that is beyond sort of something we've seen before, or something that's even sort of safe for the continuation of our society.

Mark.

And there's more than just money.

It's also the value of liberty, freedom of thought, freedom of expression.

So we do an exercise, had the pleasure of co-teaching a class this past fall on designing your life.

And with our students, we did a little exercise where you give a team of students, 20 long pieces of lasagna, some scotch tape, paper clip and a marshmallow.

And the whole, challenge is to design a tower that will be as high as possible with the marshmallow on top.

And then you let the teams go.

And what's fascinating is, when these, this exercise is run, teams of kindergartners routinely do the best teams of PhDs that teams of MBA students or JDS don't do as well.

People too often defer to authority, or assume somebody is more knowledgeable.

Kindergartners are going to try stuff.

And I think the the fundamental benefit of democracy is it gives greater agency, freedom of thought, freedom of action to the broadest possible footprint of people.

And the more you road that where people are deferring to just one person, those faster, this person has to make the decision as to what this particular venture brain will be less vibrant as a society.

And that's what's fundamentally, the more we can preserve that kernel of liberty and agency, the better off any country will be.

We're talking to Mark Zupan, the president of Alfred University, the author of Inside Job How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest.

Although I fear that quickly he's going to have to write a second and a third edition to keep up with the times.

And Mark is speaking tonight to the Rochester chapter of the World Affairs Council, and I know they appreciate his expertise in the subject, talking about government insiders, rigged systems, etc.. In our second half hour, we're going to talk about the recent piece that he wrote about Venezuela and what we can learn from stories like that.

Let's grab a couple of phone calls.

Hoover in Pittsford first.

Hi, Hoover.

Go ahead.

Hey, guys.

What a great discussion.

Yes, I did read Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, and she did speak about the Washington Post and how Jeff Bezos has, neglected his responsibility.

But when he took off that newspaper.

So when we lose our journalists in journalism, the Republic is in trouble.

Look, years ago, I worked at City Hall when we still had a strong, I'm sorry.

We had a city manager form of government before the, strong mayor form came in here in Rochester.

I was the director of internal, audit, and, I had a team of financial and program auditors that, vote for me in City Hall, and we reviewed operations of the city.

A lot of had to do with federal funding, but some of them did.

And like the police department has internal investigations because they know they have power and they better do it.

Right.

So they all have an internal program.

But we had one at the city.

And when we went to a strong mayor, they abolished the office.

Fortunately, I had left by that time it happened.

So it didn't impact me.

But I ran that office for about five years, staff of about six people, and we did internal audit.

I can tell you right now, every one of the artists we had went to City council.

There wasn't one that came back to 100% clean.

Every time we did an audit, we found stuff that needed to be corrected either programmatically or personnel wise.

So the idea that government can do a good job is true.

We can do a good job, but we've got to audit ourselves.

So, yeah, you guys are.

Rita, it's a great discussion this morning.

We got to figure out a way to audit the federal level better.

They have the 895 review process, what with the, department of Internal Audit at the, at the federal level, but it's just not working like it should be.

So I'll listen to what you have to say.

But we do need better auditors at the federal level.

And if you want to audit the president, put a clause in the Constitution, just like we said, he only can serve two terms.

He or she can only serve two terms about if we limit, access to certain, financial opportunities for ten years and put him on a, a long term salary for ten years.

So he keep he or she keeps her nose clean.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, it should be done.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I'll let President Zupan talk about that.

My sent Hoover in reading some of the emails already is that this nihilism is is sort of this creeping nihilism.

People going, well, it doesn't matter anymore.

They're all bad.

And it's not all the same.

And I'm.

I'm with you, whoever that this can be audited, this can be checked.

That's what Madison is talking about here that President Zupan cites in his piece.

I mean, again, I'll read it briefly.

Again, Madison says that, you must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Madison saw that.

I don't think anybody going back to the framers thought that the standard was perfection.

That's not achievable.

And just the fact that we have some corruption doesn't mean that you give up.

But I think it gets to a point where if you can't audit yourself at all, if there's not any meaningful check, then you're really in trouble.

So Mark Zupan Hoover is saying, but you get into office, you get out of office, you know, some sort of a ten year limit on your financial opportunities, you know, and for the sake of simply saying this is too prone to corruption, let's let's put real policy in place that is designed to take this head on here.

What do you see there?

But the importance of checks and balances.

So getting rid of Inspector general's at the federal level did perform that audit function.

It's but a lot of the book focuses on Transparency International since 1995 they've been reading and they do a personal they do a public corruption index, nowadays for 182 countries, they compile rankings and assess accounts from 13 different organizations around the globe.

And they read a country on a 0 to 100 scale, zero being completely corrupt, 100 being completely clean.

And what's fascinating about two thirds of the world's, countries nowadays are democracies.

One third are autocracies.

Democracies do appreciably better on this Transparency International scale, but they're still below the 50 mark.

So in terms of cleanliness and the latest Transparency International rating just came out, this morning, there used to be two countries with 90 and above.

This year there's no country 90 and above.

So even democracies have room for improvement.

And and sometimes we get investments, right.

We live in an area that benefited from, immensely successful public investment.

The Erie Canal, which is celebrated at 200 years.

It it paid for its costs.

Within ten years.

It made Rochester the first boomtown, made New York State, the Empire State.

Eventually railroads eroded it.

We became more of a high tech state.

But even looking at, in the city of Rochester, just look, for example, at the Rochester Unified School District, the latest budget, 1.1 billion, it had been 802,000,000 in 2016 and 694,000,000 in 2011, over that same time period.

Right now, we're just shy of 20,000 students in the district versus 27,600 in 2016 and 30,700 in 2011.

If you do the math per pupil, per year, Rochester Unified is spending $55,000 to educate our students.

So budget's been going up while enrollment has been going down.

So looking into the efficacy or is there a better model how can we better the highest priced, private school.

The list price is 33,000 just north of a place like Connolly or Allendale.

So comparing that to the 55,000, the imports the oddest thing benchmarking, checking, questioning.

Couldn't agree more.

And then we'll just say people are very creative.

But for both good and middle.

So Russia had term limits.

Putin got elected.

Yeltsin picked him or backed him as a successor, served two terms.

There was a two term limit in Russia.

What he figured out was how to get, somebody as a stand in Methodist, run where he was pulling the strings behind the scenes, was then able to come back, he's they extended the terms to six years.

He served two, six year terms.

Now they've extended it to allow for two more terms again.

In Turkey did the same thing.

He moved to a lower level post once he reached the term limit.

But then figured out how to accumulate power in the low end, and he still pulling all the strings basically in Turkey so people can still get creative.

And that's where continually checks and balances and questioning what people do.

And either what there is with respect to term limits or how they make money.

Well, on the subject of term limits, here's someone who's had a lot to say about that.

He's been a state legislator.

He's been a county legislator.

It's Mark Johns.

Hi, Mark Gooden.

Hi, Mark.

Hi, Evan.

Look, yeah, all reform starts with term limits.

And, you know, I'm the only elected official that actually pushes it.

But, I always say vote for me because I'm the TLC.

And TLC nowadays means term limits candidate.

And, by the way, it's the same website volt.

Mark johns.com and vote tlc.com.

You know your guest brought up a good point Vladimir Putin gets reelected.

Serves a two terms, gets rid of term limits.

How about XI Jinping and China?

They used to have 2 or 5 year terms.

He gets reelected and then is he popular 100% of the vote.

That guy's really something.

And he gets rid of term limits Daniel Ortega, Mr.

Freedom fighter down in Nicaragua now he's Mr.. Term limits per unlimited term president for life.

He gets rid of term limits.

Maduro the corruption starts because you can't get rid of the people that are in the top and they get the money.

They have the power, they have the influence, and everybody else.

That's an elected official that gets the same money and the party blesses it.

In New York State, it's Democrats down the Texas.

That would be Republicans.

I don't care what party or which too much power and too much money for too long is corrupted.

And it may be legal, you know, I mean, Mitch McConnell said, well, it's not corrupt and it's legal.

Well, guess what?

Just because something is legal doesn't mean that it's right.

And it has to start with term limits, because once you get term limits on all these elected guys and men and women, once you get term limits on them, they're not always thinking about this, getting reelected and reelected to the next election.

And the one after that, taking the big money that funds their campaigns, doing the favor for the big money, the funds, their campaigns.

And then you get these situations where you don't have independent redistricting.

You know, New York State was the first 122.

They said they were going to have an independent redistricting process.

They didn't do it turns out that even after they rigged it, it wasn't rigged good enough.

So in 24 New York state re you know, re gerrymandered the districts again and then all of a sudden Texas says, hey, look, it looks like a good idea.

Now they're trying to do it.

And all the other states are following in line.

So it all starts with term limits.

Then you can get independent redistricting, real campaign finance reform.

Let's have these elected, people, men and women, put their money in some type of blind trust where they can't make money off of the money they have invested.

And, I'm telling you something that, I really think that both parties, not the elected officials.

Okay, but both parties agree with the Democrats.

Took over the county legend.

Onondaga County.

This Syracuse area.

There was also a term limits ballot.

There was a term limits initiative on that ballot.

It got 75% of the vote as well.

Just let me just jump in here, Mark, because we're kind of getting far afield here.

And I know that Mark has a lot of passion for real government reform.

He's been doing that kind of work for years.

And I appreciate the phone call.

Mark.

And I will also just say to Mark's point about what's happened in states that have followed California follows Texas and, you know, drawing the maps and trying to protect congressional majorities.

I get it.

I think Indiana is an example of an outlier there.

I mean, I don't I haven't seen anything to contradict what I read a few weeks ago that Indiana stood up and said, we're not going to do what the president wants, which is redraw those maps again, it's not time.

So and that was Republicans in the Indiana State House.

So it's possible to resist that.

But Mark, I do appreciate the point.

And I want to focus Mark's point.

Mark Zupan on his call for term limits.

So take the floor.

Go ahead.

The last chapter of the book is titled how do we Form a more Perfect Union?

And it's basically like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz.

We're wearing the slippers.

It's within our power and term limits is one of the recommendations that I make in the book.

And at the time I was writing it in the state of New York, we had two people in 2015, Dean Skelos, a Republican Senate majority leader, and Sheldon Silver, the Assembly leader, who were both arrested on corruption charges.

And, it'd be hard to not argue that both because they've been there so long, had developed these conduits for skimming at the expense of the public interest.

Scholars have been in office since 1985, Sheldon Silver, for 30 years since then.

So it's one of the ways that we need to look across states, across parties.

The incumbency in the House and Senate nationally has grown appreciably over the last 100 years.

And one of the things that's happened, especially over the last 50 years, is something called facilitation services.

So if you're a member of the House, people figured out Lyndon Johnson was one of the first to do so.

If you've read any of Robert Caro stuff that if you take care of, sticking bureaucratic hassles for your constituents, they will give you credit for that, and you will get support and better be able to remain in office when you vote on controversial issues like gun control or abortion, you're going to piss off a substantial portion of your electorate, and you're not going to have as much influence on the outcome, so you're less able to take credit.

So this facilitation services, when I worked for this congressional rep in Ohio, it was amazing the amount of time and staff effort devoted to placing the constituents back home.

But what what's happened as a result is it's insulated people in Congress and it's made them less accountable.

It's giving them more slack to pursue what they want to do when it comes time to whether it's ideological interests or whether it's promoting their pecuniary interests.

Mark Johns, thank you for the phone call.

We're really late for a break.

Let's take that short break.

We'll come right back with Alfred University President Mark Zupan, who is also the author of Inside Job How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest.

He is speaking tonight to the World Affairs Council Rochester chapter for their February meeting on the power of insiders in government and how that sort of corrupt systems and what we should know about it.

And we'll come right back with your feedback next.

Coming up in our second hour, a conversation about going to the movies, which is something fewer people do, and it's apparently something that college students can't do or can't sit through, even film students.

According to journalist Rose Horowitz, who recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the film.

Students who can't sit through a movie, what does it mean for our attention spans?

What is going on here?

We examine it next hour.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson, and back to your phone calls.

We go.

Andrew in Iran to Kuwait next.

Hello, Andrew.

Hey, you guys, great show.

The right of free.

Here's a quote from James Madison.

The right of freely examining public characters and measures and our free communication there, is the only effective guardian for every other right?

I like that one quite a bit.

I have a, You were talking about nihilism.

Yeah.

The capitalist, that comment about capitalism, you know, that's I mean, capitalism is you making a better product, and then that's why you have such good electronics and such good cars nowadays and stuff like that.

Because that's who wins.

Not making the most money, but who makes the best products.

That's why you have such great stuff.

Anyway, I was going to ask your guest a question and that is, when is Ilhan Omar going to write a book on the virtues of American capitalism?

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Because I mean, really, she was worth less than $1 million last year.

In a 400 days, she's worth $30 million.

According to her congressional finance, papers.

I mean, really, it's it's a little, it's a little questionable.

And I got to jump in and say, I know zilch about Ilhan Omar finances.

I'm not.

I'm not sort of affirming or denying what you're saying.

I just haven't read about it at all.

And I take your point, by the way, about your feeling about capitalism, because the corruption and the insider dealing that we've been talking about this hour are not unique to any single economic system.

They are unique to the human experience.

And humans are involved in all of these systems.

Having said that, Mark Zupan, anything you want to add to that was pretty good.

Madison quote that Andrew dug up to, you know, I would agree.

And, there was a study done a few years ago, and Louise Slaughter was at the heart of the stock, the stock trading on congressional knowledge Act of 2012.

So between 1985 and 2001, spanning both parties, a member of the Senate, their return on their assets was 12.3 percentage points higher than the market return and six percentage points higher for House members.

So either we're electing people that can beat Warren Buffet, or they're closer to certain information.

And the Stock act, helped limit that.

But again, human nature, both capable of doing noble things.

But, it's finding checks and balances and, and continually questioning.

And it's not just in the United States and the biggest democracies in the world, people that win electoral office in India, 3 to 5% higher annual asset appreciation.

If you win than if you lose.

They hadn't.

When I was writing the book, in one year, or 34% of the winners were under criminal indictment at the same time.

So, thank you for the phone call there, Andrew.

Joe says there's two things I've never seen in my life a fat UPS guy and a poor politic.

All right, Joe, I guess I take the point.

That's a stark way of putting it, Ric says John Adams also gives us good advice.

David McCullough's biography of John Adams includes an excerpt from a letter to his son Thomas.

Public business.

My son must always be done by somebody.

If wise men decline, others will not.

If honest men refuse, it, others will not.

Clearly, Adams understood the importance of getting wise and honest citizens to serve in government.

We need to remember and put this into practice.

Our society has lost sight of the importance of adhering to honorable values.

How do we foster better character among those involved in public business?

It's from Ric.

It's a really good question.

And you know, Mark, when I was growing up, you know, I kind of idolized my dad and I always thought, well, my dad would be great public office.

You know, I was a kid.

And I remember he said to me, you know, here's what happens to good people who run for office.

They either get beaten down and they quit, or they become what they despise.

And years later I said, you know, gosh, that is really cynical.

I hope it's not true.

But John Adams, clearly, according to Rick's email, thought that that wasn't true, that it does matter.

Character will matter and we need to get back to choosing it.

I mean, again, I'm not the arbiter of character.

I don't know any one person is, but I don't know that that has been at the top of the list and in recent years.

So what do you think is character?

I mean, is there a way to sort of bring it back into the equation?

Hugely important.

And I'm an optimist at heart and believe over the long arc history, we will keep moving in the right direction.

Right now, in the last ten years, Transparency International scores have been declining.

There have been other similar declining periods of time, in the 1930s, during the Cold War.

So fundamentally, systems that give liberty and agency to people outperform.

But, you go through peaks and valleys along the way.

But one of the wonderful things Washington left us was leaving after two terms.

He could have easily stayed on.

And there were people that hoped that office would be for life.

And that set the norm until FDR.

And then we had a constitutional amendment to limit our terms, a presidential term to two in this country.

So identifying character, one of my, big idols in, in life is Abraham Lincoln.

The background that he came from, his ability to use humor and his ability fundamentally to make decisions that that matter.

And at times he was too slow to make the decisions.

But, those inspire you belief in your country and wanting to do more for for your, team.

Thank you.

Rick.

There, John emails, one more email and then I want to ask Mark, talk about Venezuela before we wrap the hour here.

But John wants to know about what, he says have been one of your guest thoughts on Pete Buttigieg talking about money and speech.

And so I dug up the recent comments.

So here's what Pete Buttigieg said last month.

He said, in a country that amended its constitution so you could not purchase a beer and then realized it was a bad idea and amended it back.

Surely we can have an amendment clarifying that a corporation is not a person and money is not speech?

Mark Zupan, what do you think of that?

I don't know if I'd go that far, but certainly the the extent to which particular companies, their ability to coalesce power, exercise it.

Yeah, it's something to worry about.

I outlawing it, I, I, I don't know if I'd go that far as to agree, but, anytime there's a concentration of power, it erodes, the checks and balances and the health of the system and whether it's on the supply side or the demand side.

When I wrote the book, one of the chapters deals with China, the world's largest autocracy, most populous autocracy.

And at the time of the 1200 richest individuals, 1 in 7 were in government, and their combined wealth was of the ones in government was 500 billion, which dwarfed, at the time, the wealth of President Obama, his administration, the House and Senate, the Supreme Court.

I don't know if it would be the same at this time around.

Especially depending on when Elon Musk was still had a Doge, if you count, his worth, and exercising influence.

So anytime there's too much of a concentration of power, this is what economists worry about.

Monopolies, lead to suboptimal outcomes.

All right.

Your piece in the Democrat in Chronicle focuses on Venezuela.

And, of course, the world's attention has been there.

And you write about some of what we've all been sort of learning or relearning, which is that this was a very prosperous country.

It does have a ton of resources.

It was a a good story until it became a tragic story in the last several decades of terrible and corrupt leadership.

And now it I mean, whatever you think about the Trump administration decision to go take Maduro, there does appear to be a chance for a clean start, although it looks to me like the rest of the regime still in place there, I don't see anything other than Maduro gone.

So I don't know what lessons you want us to draw from Venezuela.

What should we take from that?

One of the key things is you could have turnover at the very top level.

And yet the correctness of the institution, not at the corrupt and stupid nation not changing much.

Italy has changed governments on average since World War two every 13 months.

And even though there's a change, there's electoral competition.

When you look at, the Transparency International, of course, Italy does not fare well in terms of perceptions of cleanliness of the national government.

Mexico.

You served six years terms, and then there's a competition for the next person on top.

So even though Maduro is gone, the infrastructure is still there.

Heavy control over the oil industry.

So the biggest legit industry, the cartel, the sons that's also affiliated with the military, heavy control of the narcotics industry in that country.

So, I don't expect much change in terms of the cleanliness of the country, even though Maduro, it's gone.

What do you think the story on the power of insiders in government is?

And lessons from Venezuela, that they're very hard.

And even when autocracies get overthrown, 75, 80% of the time they get replaced by another autocracy.

So just just turnover, doesn't guarantee better outcomes that can lead to even more pernicious outcomes.

And so, Venezuela used to be called, sorry, Venezuela, 50s and 60s.

It was viewed as the up and coming country in the world.

More oil reserves and Saudi Arabia, now oil production, though, first under Chavez and then the Duro, fell by 70%.

The Bolivar, the national currency, lost 99.9% of its value over ten.

They tried monetary policy to compensate.

And how much of what was their own doing?

It was suppressing the media.

Chavez, had a Twitter account, 200 employees just managing his Twitter account, millions of followers in the country, his own radio show, his, TV show.

Just to expound a particular viewpoint, PDVSA, a huge company oil production company, became a personal kitty bank first person of as followed by Maduro on a whim, changed the time zone by 30 minutes.

At the start of the national flag, his nine year old daughter wanted to change the national emblem, change the emblem.

There was a constitution.

He was democratically elected.

He first, tried to foment a coup, was in prison, came out democratically elected as soon as he got elected, disbanded the assembly, rewrote the constitution, sent the Supreme Court packing.

So it just one of these classic cases of a country driving itself into the ground, but primarily on the supply side, because the want sufficient checks and balances.

You know, it started off with a democracy.

I want to thank you for not only for sharing the hour with us, but by also making sure we don't emerge from this hour with that sense that nothing matters, that it's all the same.

I mean, it does matter.

And for those who want to read more, they can pick up your book.

It's called Inside Job How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest.

It is not a nihilistic screed at all.

I mean, this is really, I think, an important set of civic education for all of us to understand the risks, but also the possibilities if we pick a better course.

Mark Zupan, president of Alfred University, I know they'll appreciate you.

At Rochester's chapter of the World Affairs Council.

We always appreciate you on conn Thanks for the help to the open.

Have a good day.

And we'll post, Mark's latest writings in our show notes as well, if you want to check it out.

Always great having him on with us.

More connections coming up in just a moment.

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