A lot of time is wasted in the halls of government in intense debate and discussion over how government should do various things. To a casual observer, this may appear to be a good thing - a sign that our system is working properly; that each policy is being fully debated and vetted. A closer look reveals that there really is no debate at all. The hours of boring hearings full of “expert” opinion, data, and anecdotes turn out to be a complete waste of time. The “debate” is on the minute details of how the policy should be done, but there is no debate on if it should be done in the first place.
Partisan politics often provide the pretense of disagreement. Each party has a different idea of how policy X should be implemented, who should administer it, etc. Meanwhile, policy X is still a bad idea to begin with. Yet, more often than not, bad policy X (which inevitably gives more power to government) is simply taken as a given, and all further discussion is on how to manage it and who will get the credit.
Don Boudreaux reminds us of this in the specific case of the bailouts. No matter how much you polish it, excrement is still what it is:
“Over in The Wonk Room, Pat Garofalo argues that “If It Happens, The Auto Industry Bailout Needs To Be Done Right.” While it’s true that some ways of bailing out this industry would be less harmful than other ways, there is absolutely no “right” way to do it. To advise government to do the auto industry bailout “right” makes as much sense as advising a burglar to burgle the neighborhood houses “right.”"
By Kurt Bouwhuis, Mackinac Center Intern over at the TryingLiberty blog:
“You actually have a consensus among conservative, Republican-leaning economists and liberal, left-leaning economists. And the consensus is this: that we have to do whatever it takes to get this economy moving again, that we’re going to have to spend money now to stimulate the economy,” Obama said on the program, which aired Sunday.
I hope “whatever it takes” does not include creating money out of thin air and distributing it to individuals and businesses at arbitrary quantities that bureaucrats sees fit. I also hope Obama and his board of economists understand that you do not grow an economy with spending, but rather, investment. You will see short run benefits from spending, but you will see stable long term growth with investment. This is assuming there are no entities messing around with the interest rates (Fed), sending inaccurate market signals to capitalists and entrepreneurs, causing an inefficient allocation of resources.
Sounds to me as though this “market crisis” will convey enough insecurity to pave the way for the unveiling of a new New Deal. Together, these two parties will lead us down a path where we will continue to live way beyond our means through the creation of numerous short run solutions. If we truly want to “fix” the economy, we may want to look at what makes an economy prosper. I would argue prosperity comes from allowing an economy to create goods and services that are demanded by consumers around the globe at a profitable price. If your economy is creating goods and services that people want, your economy will prosper. Aiding the economy has nothing to do with printing money, or stimulus checks, or public health care, or tampering with the interest rates, or subsidizing, or regulating… An economy will prosper when it is allowed to produce.
SFE blog Consectatio posts on whether it’s hypocritical or inconsistent for those advocating small government to want to be a part of government. That’s a topic we discussed at our conference on Saturday as well, and some differing and interesting ideas were shared.
As I’ve shared before, I don’t think politicians are the most important element, or even very important at all, in bringing about change. That said, everyone has different talents and abilities, and as former state lawmaker and current county commissioner Leon Drolet said at the conference , “some of us don’t have any skills at all, so we have to be politicians”.
I’d rather have politicians who love liberty than those who don’t, but I don’t put much hope in politicians, even “good” ones, to change the world for freedom or to get very far in politics. Public Choice Economics predicts that being good at politics will nearly always mean favoring more government and less liberty. And as F.A. Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, the system is stacked in such a way that the worst get to the top more often than not.
So, if you want to advance liberty, should you avoid government, or engage in it?
The political landscape has changed. The Madisonian idea of competing interest groups and parties balancing each other out is over. There are still two parties, but they’re not the two major political parties you think and the balance of power is permanently tilted in favor of one of them. It’s us and them. The people, and the political class. Jack McHugh explains:
The fundamental problem facing our nation is that true representative government has been supplanted by an inbred, self-serving, self-perpetuating political class that does not represent the people. As a result, the government has escaped the control of the people.
Evidence is all around. For example, whether or not one agrees with the policy, for decades term limits have been consistently favored by an overwhelming majority. Yet they are opposed and sabotaged by the political class at every opportunity (most recently in New York City, where the city council just overturned mayoral term limits despite their being approved by 59 percent of the voters in a 1993 initiative, confirmed in a 1996 referendum.) By what principle of representative government is negating the repeatedly expressed will of the people justified?
Similarly, there’s a durable popular consensus favoring a federal balanced budget amendment, and an equally persistent refusal by the political class to enact it. At the state level, “Taxpayer Bills of Rights” spending limitations enjoy broad public support, but will never pass a single legislative body.
It’s not just the politicians - public employees are an integral part of the problem, too. For example, in Michigan last year there was an effort by some Senate Republicans and House Democrats to outsource certain juvenile justice and adoption services to private social service agencies. Despite bipartisan recognition that it would save money and generate better outcomes for children, the measure was gutted at the 11th hour because some 800 government jobs would have become superfluous.
Locally, can anyone doubt the result if pollsters asked, “Should municipal and school employees be able to retire at age 50 with a full pension and lifetime health coverage?” Yet such benefits are commonplace. The elected officials who grant them and their beneficiaries are all members of the same political/government class, which protects its own above all else.
The political class perpetuates its rule in many ways. One is campaign finance regulations that impose nearly impossible burdens on challengers, while incumbents use tax dollars and their offices in never-ending campaigns. Also, the government’s pampered minions - public employees and their unions - have become what may be the most powerful and effective special interest, and are fully engaged in electoral politics. Their exclusive goal is defeating candidates or initiatives that might diminish their authority, resources or privileges, and their political power all but dominates elections at every level.
That particular power-center is in part the offspring of the 19th century’s Progressive movement goal of replacing the bribes, kickbacks and graft of a corrupt patronage system with a professionalized, non-partisan bureaucracy. With the growth of a massive welfare state this “good government” reform metastasized into a much deeper corruption of the democrat ideal: An unelected bureaucratic nomenkaltura, controlling or allied with today’s political class, manipulating the system to deprive the people of any real choice. You can vote for the red squad or the blue squad, but they’re all members of the same elite, which always promotes its interests ahead of yours.
Can anything be done? What’s needed is a movement that, like the Progressives in their time, captures the public’s imagination by defining a new dimension in U.S. politics: Not Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, or populist vs. capitalist, but the people vs. a political and government class that no longer represents them.
Don’t look for help from the political parties. Parties are all about power, and recent history demonstrates just how quickly a party abandons whatever principles it professes once that object is gained, instead embracing the instrumentalities of big government to keep it.
As always, the true source of reform must be the people themselves. Those who would restore representative government must raise the public’s consciousness regarding this fundamental but little understood divide: The people vs. the political/government class.
The rare candidate who sincerely opposes the status quo, or ballot initiative that challenges it, enjoys the tremendous advantage of an enthusiastic public. But they must also expect concerted counter-attacks from the arrayed forces of the system itself, rippling with political muscles.
These forces will only be overcome when the public explicitly understands where the real divide lies, and so sees through the inevitable demonization, lies and outright thuggery funded by the political establishment’s nearly bottomless resources, much of which come directly or indirectly from the state itself.
We may be approaching a tipping point where this political class and establishment amass such power and resources that efforts to dislodge them become futile, and Americans are no longer sovereigns, but subjects. While we still are able, defenders of liberty must become modern-day Paul Reveres, raising the alarm by identifying freedom’s true and most and potent enemies: Those who run and operate our unrepresentative governments.
Some wisdom from Jesse “The Body” (or is it, “The Mind”?) Ventura on the 2008 election, Republicans and Democrats:
“In pro wrestling, out in front of the people, we make it look like we all hate each other and want to beat the crap out of each other, and that’s how we get your money, [and get you to] come down and buy tickets. They’re the same thing. Out in front of the public and the cameras, they hate each other, are going to beat the crap out of each other, but behind the scenes they’re all going to dinner, cutting deals. And [they're] doing what we did, too — laughing all the way to the bank. And that to me is what you have today, in today’s political world, with these two parties.”
“I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not Wise the Freest Government is compelled to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools, they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life.” - William Blake
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.” - Milton Friedman
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.” - H.L. Mencken
“And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.” - Frederic Bastiat
“An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods” - Ambrose Bierce
“Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.” - C.S. Lewis
“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” - Herbert Marcuse
“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.” - T.S. Eliot
Great letter to the editor of the Washington Post by Don Boudreaux:
Dear Editor:
We’re supposed to be inspired by your report of high-school kids becoming politically active - working, in one case, for the Obama campaign, and in another for the McCain campaign (”Too Young to Vote, But Electing to Care,” October 28).
I’m not inspired; I’m saddened. Why applaud young people who are attracted to the opportunistic compromises, platitudes, distortions, and exaggerations of party politics? These kids either lack the maturity to understand that party politics is chiefly about winning office (rather than about pursuing truth and justice), or they DO understand this fact. In neither case is this juvenile political involvement admirable.
I agree. I was watching some fluff story (aren’t they all?) on one of the network news morning shows about polling grade school kids on their presidential choices, and all the cute little things kids are doing to support their candidate. It made me feel sick. But not as sick as this video. Why, as a parent, would you ever encourage hero-worship of a politician? Their sole function is to take things from some people and give things to other people, and try to explain themselves in a way that makes the greatest number of people like them. Sick.
Joe is a hero because he’s an outlaw. He is (horror!) practicing his personal liberty to offer plumbing services without groveling at the feet of some state board of plumbing. I also heard that he’s not registered to vote, to which some radio commentator acted offended that he dare to question a candidate if he’s not interested in politics enough to vote. I think Joe has good reason to ignore politics. No politicians from any party is going to help Joe achieve his dreams; he’s gotta do that on his own, hoping governments at all levels will simply leave him alone. Oh that he were as fortunate.
(Here’s an article about how dumb non-voluntary professional licensing is, and who it’s really for).
John Stossel hit it out of the park with his special for 20/20 Friday night called, “Stossel’s politically incorect guide to politics”. He covered spontaneous order, farm subsidies, campaign finance laws and much more. Here’s part 1, and I recommend when you have a chance to watch the entire thing.
I have a simple and honest talking point that both Barack Obama and John McCain can use this campaign season: “I will exponentially grow the size and scope of government.” Indeed, politics of personality and feel-good adjectives such as “change,” “hope” and “reform” have replaced any substantive discussion of the reality that neither candidate will fight our country’s real problem: big government.
Anyone familiar with the tax-spend-regulate-repeat mantra of the Democratic Party knows that Obama’s notion of “change” is feeble. His platform of increasing taxes on everything from energy to investment will surely satisfy big-spending politicians in Washington, D.C., eager to delve into the hundreds of billions in new government spending he has proposed.
Obama regularly attacks “Big Oil,” conveniently avoiding the fact that he voted to give $85 billion in tax breaks and subsidies to the energy industry in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. His ideology injects more government into health care, bails out everything from Fannie Mae to Detroit automakers and willingly grabs the “excessive” profits of oil companies for new spending programs.
This is not to say that McCain is a saint. His “maverick” affinity for bipartisanship has led to sweeping restrictions on free speech through campaign finance reform and an increasingly interventionist and costly foreign policy.
McCain joined Obama in supporting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which legitimizes the illegitimate act of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. McCain’s opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending deserves praise, but like Obama, he supports an enormously burdensome cap-and-trade scheme that will substantially increase energy prices and damage our economy while having little, if any, effect on carbon emissions.
The rapid growth of government endorsed by both candidates is not a sustainable path for our country. With a national debt nearing $10 trillion, Obama and McCain seem to have determined that the only logical solution to our long-term problems is to spend even more.
A responsible platform that truly embodied change and reform would focus on the big issues that threaten to bankrupt our country: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The trustees of Social Security and Medicare estimated a couple years ago that Social Security will begin paying out more than the amount of revenue it receives in 2017, necessitating a solution that puts citizens, not politicians, in charge of their futures.
Obama has proposed (you guessed it!) a tax hike to solve the problem, while McCain has reluctantly endorsed a more favorable approach that allows workers to designate a fraction of their contributions for private accounts.
Common sense, free-market solutions to the entitlement crises exist, but neither candidate has stepped up to the plate to consider them.
Instead, Obama and McCain prefer to argue over the babies of the daughters of vice presidents, what someone’s wife said and who is more patriotic. I submit this: A true patriot — Democrat or Republican — desires to expand individual liberty, tackle the out-of-control growth of government and ensure that future generations have the same opportunities we have been afforded. The long-term challenges we face as a country won’t be solved by higher taxes, more wasteful spending and increased government regulation, regardless of how politically popular these solutions may be this week. Reducing the size of government allows the free market to flourish, increasing freedom and prosperity for all.
Any other approach is like putting out fire with gasoline.
