The National Mall goes kitsch: America's cluttered backyard shows just how hard it is for Congress to say "no.".

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Memorials

Last month, several thousand people gathered on the National Mall for a "virtual groundbreaking" for a proposed memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. It's set to go up on a piece of land just off the Tidal Basin, putting it within view of the Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt memorials.

Plans are also in the works for an African-American History Museum and a memorial to President Eisenhower. Six years ago, Congress approved a half-billion-dollar "Congressional Visitors Center" on the Mall to pat itself on the back, a project now three years behind its scheduled completion and more than a hundred million dollars over budget. Some conservatives are agitating for a Ronald Reagan Memorial. It's likely that we'll also get a memorial to 9/11 and the war on terrorism.

The National Mall, originally envisioned by Pierre L'Enfant as a serene place for public celebration and quiet contemplation, is quickly turning into a kitschy amusement park of special interests. Recent additions--the FDR Memorial, the World War II Memorial, and the National Museum of the American Indian--have added clutter and pedestrian traffic, further obstructing the serene views L'Enfant intended.

The Mall presents a tidy symbol of what has happened to the federal government over the last half-century. If Congress doesn't have the backbone to turn people down when meting out a limited supply of acreage on the National Mall, you can see why the federal budget would present the same problems writ large. There's only so much space on the Mall, but there are many ways to transcend the budget's limits: deficit spending, "trust fund" dipping, tax increases.

Economists frequently talk about the problem of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. Select groups of people with a strong interest in, for example, a federal subsidy can come to Washington and wield quite a bit of clout.

An individual congressman, then, will feel tremendous pressure from hundreds of lobbying beggars, but little from the millions of federal taxpayers who subsidize them. After all, the cost per taxpayer for most of these programs is just pennies.

Once a subsidy, program, or agency is in place, it's set in stone. Congress won't ever move to eliminate it for the same reason the program was started in the first place--each small, powerful interest group getting these benefits has much more incentive to punish lawmakers who cross them than does the average taxpayer footing the bill.

What's happened to the Mall is a...