Today's column is on the malign influence of the incentive bonus in politics and business. It mentions the 19th-century Supreme Court case of Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, an early example of condemnation of paying lobbyists for performance. Loyal reader Stuart Levine Esq. will have wished for a link, so there it is.

Supreme Court Justice Robert C. Grier, who wrote the Marshall opinion, was on the (very) wrong side of the Dred Scott decision. But he got this one right, not mincing words to describe the conduct of lobbyist A.J. Marshall. Marshall had a secret deal to collect a bonus from the B&O if he persuaded Virginia's General Assembly to give the railroad a right of way to the Ohio River. (At this point in time Virginia also included what we know as West Virginia.) Marshall kept not only his pay deal secret from the legislature but also his ownership of land near the potential rail tracks. Thus he had a double conflict of interest.

Here's an excerpt from Grier's opinion:

Influences secretly urged under false and covert pretenses must necessarily operate deleteriously on legislative action, whether it be employed to obtain the passage of private or public acts. Bribes, in the shape of high contingent compensation, must necessarily lead to the use of improper means and the exercise of undue influence. Their necessary consequence is the demoralization of the agent who covenants for them; he is soon brought to believe that any means which will produce so beneficial a result to himself are "proper means," and that a share of these profits may have the same effect of quickening the perceptions and warming the zeal of influential or "careless" members in favor of his bill.

The use of such means and such agents will have the effect to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations, and produce universal corruption, commencing with the representative and ending with the elector. Speculators in legislation, public and private, a compact corps of venal solicitors, vending their secret influences, will infest the capital of the Union and of every state, till corruption shall become the normal condition of the body politic, and it will be said of us as of Rome -- omne Romae venale.