I STAND BY my guess that Sylvester Turner will be the next mayor of Houston. What gives me pause, however, is that when I voted yesterday, I had to circle the Kingwood Library parking lot four times to find a space. This big turnout suggests that conservatives may vote in greater numbers than I anticipated. If it happens . . .
. . . good.
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One unusual thing is that only two card-pushers were at work. One, may their tribe increase, was the Kingwood Tea Party. The Tea Party push card was identical to Unca D's on mayor, controller, and at-large council races, except for at-large 2. The Tea Party went with Willie R. Davis. Unca D recommends David Robinson.
The other electioneer wore a Houston Police Department tee-shirt. His card said, "Adrian Garcia, Steve Costello, the Houston Chronicle, Houston firefighters, police officers, classroom teachers and community groups agree: WE'RE ALL IN FOR SYLVESTER!"
Where was Bill King's card-pusher?
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If you missed Unca D's essay Monday on the three political tribes that run City Hall, go back and review. The tribes are the Downtown Tribe (lawyers, architects, contractors, etc.), the Unions Tribe (police, firefighters, etc.), and the Minorities Tribe.
They have their own interests, but they are united against a common enemy, the Taxpayer Tribe.
What these tribes also have in common, besides their enemy, is that they are all rent seekers.
Rent-seeking theory is one of the great economic insights of our time, though it has a horrible name. Here is a good explanation:
[Rent-seeking theory] is simple but powerful. People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. They typically do so by getting a subsidy for a good they produce or for being a particular class of people, by getting a tariff on a good they produce, or by getting a special regulation that hampers their competitors. Elderly people, for example, often seek higher Social Security payments; steel producers often seek restrictions on imports of steel; and licensed electricians and doctors often lobby to keep regulations in place that restrict competition from unlicensed electricians or doctors.
. . . . A better term is "privilege seeking."
(David R. Henderson, "Rent Seeking," The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.)
The Downtown Tribe sees rents in the form of overpriced city contracts to do things of questionable value; the Unions Tribe seeks rents in the form of salaries and, more importantly, benefits in excess of market value; and the Minorities Tribe seeks rents from, among other things, set-aside programs for minorities -- a method of enriching minority "contractors" (for example) who win shares of contracts at higher prices than are paid for the main contractors, then brokering their contract back to one of the main contractors, keeping a share of the price as "rent."
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