Shortly after posting the 2005 House Scorecard of Fiscal and Trade Issues I found myself posting a few stories on other issues that may or may not have pushed the scorecard down from the front page and away from your attention. I strongly encourage you to read through the summary of the scorecard. I cannot emphasize enough that the scorecard indicates that if you take tax cuts off the table the two parties are comparable (comparably bad!) on economic issues.

But the nature of the House makes the economic scorecard inherently imperfect and that is what I want to draw attention to in this post. Ideally, members of Congress would be voting on the proposals of each side or on issues that clearly illustrate the divide between more or less freedom. The fundamentally polarizing nature of the culture war tends to make the social and defense issues scorecard more accurate, in my opinion. The economic and trade issues scorecard is less accurate because there are fewer situations where the vote is clear cut.

It would be nice if all of the votes were between more or less economic freedom. But that isn't how the real world operates. The Republican majority in the House has been pushing a radical agenda that amounts to state capitalism based on a strong increase in corporate welfare. The scorecard, rather accurately, ranks Congressmen based on their opposition or support of this agenda. If state capitalism and corporate welfare were the only ways in which economic freedom could be diminished, it would be an accurate measure of how much the Representative supports economic freedom. But there are many ways to skin a cat.

The failure of the scorecard is the inability to accurately measure how much the Representative would support the other alternative way in which economic freedom can by reduced. For years liberals have pushed a kindler, gentler version of state capitalism that depends on social welfare, not corporate welfare. When the Democrats were the establishment proponents of both free markets and corporatism could unite in opposition. The result was the modern Republican Party. Today, with corporatism as the establishment, the proponents of free markets and social democracy are now the odd political bed fellows.

In the Senate it is possible to offer as many amendments as you want to a bill, as long as they are germane. Social democrats are able to offer up amendments, if they have the courage, that attempt to implement their vision of a social welfare state. A scorecard can include votes on both social and corporate welfare. But in the House, because of the House Rules Committee, amendments must be approved beforehand. Social democrats can be locked out of the process entirely. Their only option is to vote down the corporate welfare of the opposition. There is rarely an opportunity to vote in favor of their own big government agenda.

Barbara Lee of California, Major Owens of New York, and Frank Pallone of New Jersey all received high scores in fiscal and trade issues. Are they free marketers or social democrats? We may suspect that they are, in fact, social democrats. But based on the scorecard we can only conclude that they strongly oppose the corporatism of the Republican Party. If anyone has suggestions on how to better pinpoint supporters of free markets and free markets alone, I'm all ears. Or eyes, I suppose.