Mike Lee: End the Ex-Im Bank Because of Crony Capitalism! But Don’t Cut Military Spending

On
Tuesday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), one of the more libertarian-leaning
members of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, went on

The Independents to talk about his refreshing call to end,
rather than mend, the Export-Import
Bank, because Ex-Im is a leading contributor to crony
capitalism. I wanted to follow up on this odd-sounding passage
in his National Review
piece on same:

Whether the beneficiaries of particular Ex-Im Bank loan
guarantees are respected, successful companies like Boeing or crony
basket cases like Solyndra is irrelevant. Twisting policy to
benefit any business at the expense of others is unfair and
anti-growth.

Lavishing praise on one company while disparaging
another seems like an odd way to stress the across-the-board
awfulness of crony capitalism, particularly given the centrality of
Boeing to the Ex-Im story. Here’s Reason columnist
Veronique de Rugy, in a must-bookmark column from last September
titled “Bipartisan
Corporate Welfare: It’s time for the Export-Import bank to
go“:

Back in 1981, when he was fighting to get rid of the Ex-Im Bank,
[former budget director David] Stockman documented that it bestowed
about two-thirds of its subsidies on a handful of giant, profitable
manufacturers: Boeing, General Electric, Westinghouse, and the
like. Little has changed since then, and what has changed has
mostly been for the worse. 

Ex-Im’s own data show that bank activity is highly concentrated
in a few industries—primarily aviation, gas and oil exploration,
and manufacturing. The aircraft industry alone benefited from $11.5
billion worth of loan guarantees in 2012. 

Boeing was the recipient of almost 50 Ex-Im Bank deals worth
$12.2 billion (including insurance, loans, and guarantees). This
one company, with its army of lobbyists, brought in roughly 80
percent of Ex-Im’s loan guarantees. 

“Respected,” “successful,” or not, Boeing is America’s
number-one welfare queen. In my opinion, as long as military
spending keeps shooting through the roof (up
80 percent in real terms between 2001 and 2012), crony defense
capitalism is inevitable, and an exponentially larger problem than
Solyndra. So I asked Mike Lee about halfway through this clip
whether he would cut military spending. And he said no:

Note, too, Lee’s answer to Kmele Foster’s question about whether
he regrets his role in last fall’s strategically incompetent
(IMO)
government shut-down.

As Nick Gillespie has
argued, willingness to cut military spending is a “real test to
see if…Republicans are serious about
making any cuts in government spending.” There’s
a lot to like about Mike Lee, at least compared the median senator,
but it’s telling that one of the best exemplars of the Tea
Party/limited government wave of hardcore fiscal conservatives
cannot—even in the course of rightly decrying Boeing’s crony
capitalism!—bring himself to cut even one penny from the behemoth,
wasteful, and corrupting military-industrial complex. 

Reason on Mike Lee
here.