James V. DeLong on Ending "Big SIS" (The Special Interest State)

"Obamacare is not, as one judge says, a national solution to a problem," argues James V. DeLong. "It's 2,000 pages...of special-interest-written law."

As such, it exemplifies what DeLong, a long-time Washington insider who has worked for many think tanks and government agencies, denounces as "Big SIS" or the "special-interest state." In his scathing - and utterly convincing - new book, Ending Big SIS and Renewing the American Republic, Reason Contributing Editor DeLong traces how "the political system creates economic advantages for special interests and then demands that part of the profits be fed back into the political system, where they are used to enhance the power of the political incumbents."

Whether the topic is defense spending, agricultural subsidies, health care, or the financial sector, DeLong documents the pervasive rot at the core of Washington's way of doing business - and provides ideas for cutting Big SIS down to size.

For more information on the book and DeLong, go to http://www.specialintereststate.org/index.shtml. For his Reason archive, go to http://reason.com/people/james-v-delong/all

About 6 minutes. Produced by Joshua Swain. Interview by Nick Gillespie. Camera by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, and Swain.

Subscribe to Reason's YouTube page to get automatic notifications when new material goes live. Go to http://reason.tv for downloadable versions of all our videos.

Follow Reason on Twitter at http://twitter.com/reason; follow Gillespie at http://twitter.com/nickgillespie