Column: Are we living in the Hunger Games?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

You know the story: While the provinces starve, the Capital City lives it up, its wheeler-dealer bigshots growing fat on the tribute extracted from the rest of the country.

We don't live in The Hunger Games yet, but I'm not the first to notice that Washington, D.C., is doing a lot better than the rest of the country. Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn't what it used to be. But not so much in the Washington area, where housing prices are going up, fancy restaurants advertise $92 Wagyu steaks, and the Tyson's Corner mall outshines -- as I can attest from firsthand experience -- even Beverly Hills' famed Rodeo Drive.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the contrast is even starker. As Adam Davidson recently wrote in The New York Times, riding the Amtrak between New York and D.C. exposes stark contrasts between the "haves" of the capital and the have-nots outside the Beltway. And he correctly assigns this to the importance of power.

Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O'Rourke famously observed: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." But it's not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It's a cold calculation: You're likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.

I'm not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, "There aren't tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn't seem like a sign of national health that America's political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they're supposed to serve."

No, it's not a sign of health. And it's no coincidence that our lawmakers have weathered the recession better than America has.

It's a sign of illness. And it's exactly the illness that federalism and limited national government -- something I wrote about in the context of secession-talk last week -- was designed to prevent. The reason this approach isn't working any more is that we're not following it.

Under the original Constitutional plan, the federal government's powers were to be few, and mostly concerned with external relations. Under those circumstances, the risk of corruption was comparatively low. Nearly all regulation would come from state governments. They might be corrupted -- since they'd be the only ones worth corrupting -- but problems would be compartmentalized (corruption in Rhode Island wouldn't have much effect on Connecticut, much less Utah) and disciplined by competition with other states.

Well, it's been quite a while since things worked that way; things started go go downhill with the federal expansion under the New Deal, and then really took off after the "regulatory explosion" under President Nixon, who created such entities as the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety & Health Administration.

It's no coincidence that as the federal government morphed from an entity that did a few highly visible things well, to one that did a whole lot of not-so-visible things less well, respect for the federal government plummeted even as the political class' wealth climbed.

That's where we are now, with a capital city that looks more and more like that of an imperial power where courtiers and influence-peddlers abound. Want to do something about it? Don't secede. Return to the Constitution.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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