Special interest groups are at their heart a way for individuals with few means to control a debate to band together and influence politicians and public opinion from a narrow, perhaps myopic point of view. Typically the most successful interest groups thrive by convincing Washington to redistribute wealth. This process was at its most striking during the Medicare reform debate when groups like AARP were able to convince a Congress and Executive branch controlled by ostensibly “small government” conservatives that the answer to our problems was massive government expansion.

There is no reason why, in the freest and most affluent nation in history people should want for the basic necessities of life. However, those needs, medicine for example, must to be balanced against the basic immorality of redistributing wealth. The problem with most special interest groups is that instead of steering the debate in a traditional free market direction they focus on solving the problems of one group by taking from another. The Medicare reform debate demonstrated this perfectly. By expanding coverage on such a massive scale it does not address the disease (that of increasing prices due to increasing government influence). It simply covers up the symptom, specifically the under covered elderly. In the end this does not eradicate the problem. It simply shifts the burden.

James Madison described this phenomenon in Federalist 10. Instead of special interest groups he used the term faction, but the intent was the same. He described a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” [1] Therein lies the fundamental mischief (as Madison would describe it) of special interest groups. They do not advocate the sort of free market reforms that would cure the disease. They advocate for socializing the symptom.

A real and lasting solution to expensive medicine would be based largely on diminishing the forces that raise drug prices, not by shifting the costs. These solutions would be expanding patent protections, limiting tort liabilities of companies, breaking up potential monopolies and expanding free trade agreements with other countries. In a less direct sense restructuring our tax and regulatory structures, which often provide disincentives to individual savings would have a positive effect on individual purchasing power which would reduce the relative cost of all goods including drugs.

Unfortunately, positive free market changes are much harder to implement than redistributive social programs and harkening back to Madison’s definition of factions we see why this is so. Typically we focus on the first sentence of his definition that a faction is “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole”, but the important distinction is the second part: that they “are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Thus AARP and its peers on both sides of the aisle have a significant negative influence any debate where economics is the driving factor, because seek short term gains for a few by increasing long term burdens on the whole.