Dear Friends,
It seems to me, as a matter of fact, that the farther government is removed from the people, the less it cares about the people and instead, it’s own power. At the city level you have some power, if you can muster several people to show up at a town council, but at national level you have to muster millions of people willing to act to effect your senators, how much more if government is taken to a supranational level? At a supranational level could government be coaxed to reflect the needs of all the people instead of the faction that keeps them in power, moreover, independence would be an impossible dream. Today everyone is talking about the possible dissolution of the European Union. In as far as, that supranational government and it’s pernicious bureaucracy is undermined, the better for humanity. As a free trade area it is a great idea… and that was where it should have ended.
A government that is so far from the people, those in it need bodyguards, is too far from the people. Think about it, does your state representative need a daily body guard? In most cases no. In those cases where they do, they are far removed from the people they “represent,” that only a select few get to meet and talk to him or her. Moreover, if they need a body guard, they probably done something to warrant a body guard. Those who have no or very little power over others never need a bodyguard. If government didn’t have such an outsized power to make, destroy or crush someone, or some business, government wouldn’t warrant the time to threaten… they wouldn’t need bodyguards. It can be reasoned then that the more a government official needs a bodyguard, the farther they are removed from those they represent along with they have too much power to effect the lives of others, negatively or positively.
Distance itself give a person a feeling of superiority, a feeling of superiority gives a human being a god complex. This is especially true, when the levers of power are shared, but by few. The responsibility for wrong decisions is shared, while the credit for right decisions or any decision that can be spun as right, can be taken direct credit for, even as all the cronies do too. How liberating, to be able to use humanity as a lab rat in which to try, this economic regulation or that experiment in immigration, without responsibility. No way that could go wrong, eh? Meanwhile, even as responsibility is shirked, negative consequences are averted. So, even if a government far removed from the people, constantly poked the people in the eye and called it ice cream… the people would have no way to do anything about it.
This is not because this party is good and that party is evil, nor that all representatives are bad people, there certainly are a high percentage that are bad people, but… they are all human beings. People are self interested. You are, I am, she is, and he is too, we are all self interested, that is a fact of human nature. Economists call us rational maximizers. We rationally maximize our outcomes in any given situation. So if a situation has very very strong incentives to act a certain way, even if that way is immoral, add to the incentives a strong disincentive to act in other ways… and a rational maximizer can be induced to sell their very soul. A government distant from the people will always have those pernicious incentives and disincentives.
The supranational governmental structure of the European Union itself not only creates distance from those it is supposed to represent, but in and of itself, creates a regulatory structure that hinders small businesses in a host of ways. This is a natural outcome of the pernicious incentives that our leaders are awash in. Those who can effect the outcome of an election can then effect the outcome of legislation to be on the winning side of that legislation. It follows that only those with money today can do that while those who have potential money, from an innovation they have have had tomorrow, cannot. As Milton Friedman said in Free To Choose… why improve your own quality and lower your price when you can go to government and get your competition shut down?
If the European Union is struck a mortal blow then so be it. Of course the elite who have suckled at the teat of the state for so long will not let it go without a fight. They have become so used to having no responsibility and acting without consequences, they will shriek and wail, at the very though of having to sidle up to the unwashed peasants, they represent. The fact they appear to be in such a panic shows either they are so gullible they believed their own hype, else a conniving that would make a conspiracy lover wince, because this referendum was known about for years… so why didn’t the elite prepare plans for this contingency? Adding weight to my assertion, Government close to the people is best, the farther government is from the people, necessarily, the less power it must have, in relation to the distance of the governors.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
