Kudos to the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins for proposing a new corollary to public choice theory: namely, that actions objected to by special interests are motivated by a desire to raise campaign money from special interests.

His critique of the House Republican tax reform plan in a recent edition—which he correctly notes has earned the enmity of the retailers and petroleum refiners, along with the apparel, tourism, and higher education industries, not to mention the Koch brothers—is that it is merely a feint to extract campaign contributions from the handful of companies that have thus far voiced support for the plan. Perhaps I have learned nothing in my two decades in Washington, D.C., because I have always assumed that crass congressmen using legislation solely to raise money would propose bills that pleased wealthy interests instead of angering them, and thus far the opposition appears much larger, and traditionally Republican, than those that stand to benefit from such a change.