BINGO!
26 September 2007
News Editor, WTOP Radio
Washington, DC
To the Editor:
For a second straight day your reporters - when covering candidates for next year's election - referred to "the presidential sweepstakes." I'm struck by this term's familiarity and appropriateness.
As with sweepstakes for cash, the odds are difficult. At the beginning of each election cycle, everyone but an incumbent President faces long odds of winning. But the pay-off from winning this sweepstakes is life-changingly huge. The winner immediately gains such goodies as buckets of prestige, a splendid house, a 747 jet, bodyguards for life, torrents of influence and power, and rock-star-like fame.
Just as each person who enters the Publishers' Clearinghouse Sweepstakes does so because he or she hopes to win incredible personal benefits, so, too, with Presidential candidates: they enter overwhelmingly for themselves, not to serve the rest of us.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
News Editor, WTOP Radio
Washington, DC
To the Editor:
For a second straight day your reporters - when covering candidates for next year's election - referred to "the presidential sweepstakes." I'm struck by this term's familiarity and appropriateness.
As with sweepstakes for cash, the odds are difficult. At the beginning of each election cycle, everyone but an incumbent President faces long odds of winning. But the pay-off from winning this sweepstakes is life-changingly huge. The winner immediately gains such goodies as buckets of prestige, a splendid house, a 747 jet, bodyguards for life, torrents of influence and power, and rock-star-like fame.
Just as each person who enters the Publishers' Clearinghouse Sweepstakes does so because he or she hopes to win incredible personal benefits, so, too, with Presidential candidates: they enter overwhelmingly for themselves, not to serve the rest of us.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Sunday March 16, 2008 at 8:02pm