Call it Kleptocracy

When Mobutu Sese Seko sold the needy for a pair of shoes and looted his national treasury, we knew what to call it.

When Ferdinand Marcos sold the needy for 2,000 pairs of shoes and enriched his family at the cost of his people, we knew what to call that.

When Robert Mugabe, under the guise of "land reform," confiscates functioning farms in his hungry nation and gives them to his wife and other relatives to become their private plantations, we have a name for that.

Such leaders provoke international condemnation and indignation in part because their deeds are so brazen. They blatantly disregard the common good of their people and of the nations in their charge and abuse their power for personal enrichment and the enrichment of their families, friends, cronies and economic peers.

And so we call them kleptocrats.

Wikipedia provides a useful definition of "kleptocracy":

Kleptocracy literally means rule by thieves. It is a pejorative, informal term for a corrupt form of government and represents an extreme form of the use of government for rent seeking. In a kleptocracy the rulers and their cronies use the mechanisms of government to tax the public at large in order to amass personal fortunes.

But what do we call a subtler, somewhat less extreme form of "the use of government for rent seeking"?

What if, instead of seizing plantations, a government concocts a Medicare law that requires the public to pay pharmaceutical companies whatever price they ask — actually making it illegal to negotiate for lower prices on behalf of the public?

The result of such a law is the transfer of public wealth to private interests without any legitimate policy explanation. Is using the public treasury to boost the stock prices of one's political supporters significantly different from using it to increase the size of one's wife's collection of footwear?

Or consider what Daniel Altman calls the Bush administration's "Neoconomy." Daniel Gross summarizes Altman's analysis of Bush's economic policy in Slate:

Their goal was to eliminate or sharply reduce taxes on savings and investing and instead finance government activities by taxing wages. So marginal tax rates were cut on the wealthy, the estate tax was slated for elimination, and taxes on dividends and capital gains were slashed. The result: hundreds of billions of dollars of the Social Security surplus spent, hundreds of billions in extra debt, subpar job growth, and structural deficits as far as the eye can see.

And they're not done yet. If the Neoconomists have their way, Altman concludes, "All your income from working would be taxed" while "none of your income from other forms of saving would be taxed." That's a huge relative advantage for those with enough assets to invest and live off of savings and a huge relative disadvantage for people who haven't yet made it. Two Americas, anyone?

President Bush's goal is further reaching — and far more radical — than just lots of fancy shoes for Laura and the twins. Yet he is brazenly "using the mechanisms of government to tax the public at large in order to amass personal fortunes" for himself, his political supporters and his "base" — the "haves and the have mores."

The shoe fits. And we know what to call leaders who do this. Kleptocracy by any other name still smells rank.