With his simian air of ferocious, sullen reserve, he exuded an intensely intimidating power dedicated to horses, graft and politics. For decades, Tammany Hall had ruled through a very simple formula, explained by Croker in a rare interview: "Think of the hundreds of foreigners dumped into our city. They are too old to go to school. There is not a mugwump [reformer] who would shake hands with them...Tammany looks after them for the sake of their vote, grafts them upon the Republic, makes them citizens in short; and although you may not like our motives or our methods, what other agency is there...If we go down into the gutter, it is because there are men in the gutter."

It was really quite elementary, wrote muckraker Lincoln Steffens: Tammany owned the "plain people" because in the absence of government services, Tammany provided a helping hand. "They speak pleasant words, smile friendly smiles, notice the baby, give picnics up the River or the Sound, or a slap on the back; find jobs, most of them at city expense, but they also have news-stands, peddling privileges, railroad and other business places to dispense." And with those votes, Tammany ruled the city government and its tens of thousands of jobs and the vast ocean of boodle harvested from controlling the docks, the police, the health department, and the courts. It was a reliably rich take.

- Conquering Gotham, Jill Jonnes

History Repeats Itself

Christopher Dodd coerced banks via the Community Reinvestment Act to extend loans to uncreditworthy persons. In a free market, unfettered by interlopers, lending institutions would not have assumed such risk.

Thanks to Sen. Christopher Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank and others, the lending industry spent years issuing mortgages to millions of Americans who had no hope of repaying. Sen. Dodd and Rep. Frank believe homeownership is a right unfettered by income or credit history, and over time, they were instrumental in forcing the industry to lend to some of the least creditworthy Americans.

As everyone knows, the results were disastrous. The housing bubble they helped create and inflate has burst, driving the economy into recession, the lending industry into chaos and millions of Americans into foreclosure, bankruptcy or both. (But at least Sen. Dodd got his millions in campaign cash from the financial industry and special rates on his mortgages from Countrywide Financial.)

And how about this via Instapundit:

The main problem with a payroll tax holiday is that it minimizes Congressional opportunities for graft and larding out goodies to their contributors. That makes it both wise and politically unfeasible, at least until we get a better class of congresscritter.

How about one more? This one puts the DEMOCRATIC graft in perspective:

A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It's they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It's government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's hawking of Barack Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat; Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel's alleged tax-writing favors; former Rep. William Jefferson's business bribes; and the Jack Abramoff scandal are mere pimples on the government corruption landscape. We can think of these and similar acts as jailable illegal corruption. They pale in comparison to what's for all practical purposes the same thing, but simply legal corruption.

The cost of this government largesse/graft is going to come in the form of higher taxes and there are some estimates that taxes as a share of GDP will be 24 percent by 2050!

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