Pay-to-Play: Why the Fuss?

Government has become so adept at selling political favors that scholarly treatises have been written about a veritable science of “political extortion.” A case in point would be the book Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion, by Fred S. McChesney (Harvard University Press, 1997). Much has been written about governments granting favors to businesses in return for “campaign contributions” or outright kickbacks, but McChesney focuses on an even more insidious phenomenon: politicians threatening to impose menacing costs on businesses or entire industries with regulation and taxation as “a form of political extortion or blackmail.” FULL ARTICLE