It’s perfect: the man nominated by George Bush to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission received a $150,000 payoff from the organization representing the businesses he would be in charge of regulating.

But Michael Baroody is probably telling the truth when he says that the money won’t have any impact on the way he does his new job, assuming he ever gets confirmed; he was never what his patrons would consider a risky proposition, with a resume including 10 years in the not especially consumer-friendly Reagan and Bush I administrations and a stint at the Republican National Committee, where he helped write the 1980 Republican party platform that includes a plank explicitly rejecting the need for consumer advocates within the federal government.

An informed consumer making economic choices and decisions in the marketplace is the best regulator of the free enterprise system. Consumers are also taxpayers, workers, investors, shoppers, farmers, and producers. The Republican Party recognizes the need for consumer protection but feels that such protection will not be enhanced by the creation of a new consumer protection bureaucracy. Just as there can be no single monolithic consumer viewpoint, so the Republican Party opposes the funding of special self-proclaimed advocates to represent consumer interests in federal agency proceedings.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission was already in existence at the time — a creature, like the Environmental Protection Agency, of the socialistic Nixon administration — but had been kept on a subsistence budget throughout the Ford and Carter years, a practice that continued during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. (At the end of Reagan’s second term, the average response time to consumer complaints was nearly two months; a decade later, under the Clinton administration, the average was down to 48 hours.)

Baroody left the Bush I administration in 1990 to work at the National Association of Manufacturers, the big tippers who rewrote his severance package to include the $150,000 after they learned he was a candidate for the CPSC job. He left NAM in 1993 for a year to head the National Policy Forum, a right-wing think tank founded by Republican strategist Haley Barbour, now the governor of Mississippi, and returned at the end of 1994. The short-lived NPF, which functioned as an adjunct of the Republican National Committee, chaired at the time by Barbour, was involved in laundering cash from a Hong Kong businessman into the RNC’s 1994 campaign operations (accidentally, according to Barbour).

Along with his own work experience, Baroody boasts a distinguished family pedigree. His father, William Baroody, Sr., put the then-fledgling American Enterprise Institute on the political map during his tenure as that organization’s president, beginning in the early 1950’s, and was one of the primary forces behind Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964. Baroody’s older brother, William, Jr., served as a legislative aide to Melvin Laird and joined Laird when the latter moved from Congress to the Nixon administration as secretary of defense, later serving as an assistant to Gerald Ford, a family friend and AEI admirer from his days in Congress, and succeeding his father as AEI president.

So NAM’s parting gift wasn’t intended to suppress any non-existent inclinations toward zealous consumer advocacy; it was just in recognition of a job well done, and no doubt intended to ease the pain of moving from a lucrative lobbying career into a less immediately rewarding government one. If Baroody is confirmed, according to the Times story reporting the payment, the $150,000 will almost fill the gap between his government salary and what he earned at NAM. With less than two years remaining in the administration, he’ll be back in the private sector and commanding a larger salary for his troubles before he really even feels the pinch of that penurious federal wage.

One can genuinely see the logic behind Baroody’s and the Bush administration’s insistence that the flap about the money is much ado about nothing. There is no impropriety, or even the appearance of impropriety, because Baroody was never going to do anything that manufacturers might want him not to do. The job is a continuation of lobbying by other means, and there’s no reason he should be expected to starve while doing it.

It is, in a way, the definition of incorruptible.

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