Chris Suellentrop has an article in Slate about Congressional corruption. He briefly relates how back in 1994 Washington state residents voted out then Speaker Tom Foley because he brought home too much pork:

Examining the campaigns of the two "giant-killers" of 1994 and 2004, George Nethercutt and John Thune, illustrates the Republican transformation. Nethercutt beat Tom Foley, then the Speaker of the House, by running as a citizen-outsider, and Eastern Washington voters were embarrassed about being on the receiving end of so many government contracts. "It's basically pork. Even though we live here, it just isn't right," one voter told Time magazine. Ross Perot campaigned against Foley before the election and asked voters at a rally, "Are you for sale?"

I found this fascinating, and now I really want to learn more about that election. After I interned in Congress I decided that I could never be a legislator because too much of the job is bring home pork for your district. At best this is an amoral process of deciding who gets the most benefit of money the government is going to spend anyway. At worst it is a battle to grab as much money as possible from the public treasury regardless of if it is well spent. Every district wants to elect a Congressman who is good at this bringing home the money because every other district is too. The case of Foley is one of the only times I have heard of a district acting against its own interests for the interests of the country as a whole. Are there any lessons we can learn from this? Would there be any way of changing the way that Congressional elections are framed to encourage this result to happen more often? People are generally good, and will do the right thing if they know what it is, so perhaps we need to better articulate what the costs of pork are. At times, I have also thought about if there would be anyway of devising a system to replace pork barrel politics. For instance, if each Congressman got a number of "credits" that they could apply towards preference in receiving a government project. There are a gazillion problems with this, but maybe I'll write about it more in the future.