Dear Friends,
It seems to me that there are a lot of people who are ignorant of the fact that everything that happens in government is politics. Politics is the nature of government and all governments over all time have been afflicted thus. Human nature and the nature of power precludes any exception.
Take the example of Xerxes king of Persia. As related by Herodotus, Xerxes had no interest in attacking Greece. He was content to luxuriate in his palaces and party. But politics got in the way of his will. He had to invade Greece to save face in a political power match. So he did…
So if even a king with absolute power must bend to politics can it reasonably be argued that politics is not the warp and the woof of government? The be all and all of every government action is politics. But politics is not moral despite all the calls for morality in political rhetoric. Rhetoric that is as empty of human heartedness as a piranha swimming in the Amazon.
Politics is an animal that is at it’s nature a carnivore. Eating anything it can and pretending to express that which it has consumed. No more than the shark is the whale that it has taken a bite from, is politics moral, because it has chomped down on some aspect of morality for it’s own ends… Power.
Because power is why politics exists. Power over other human beings. As Thrasymachus said in Plato’s Republic, Most people only wish ‘not’ to be tyrannized, so they consider a system of ‘justice,’ to hold those that would abuse them at bay. But as we all know Thrasymachus didn’t have the best interests of humanity in mind, he had power politics as a valid end.
Adam Smith said that most people, (or maybe all people I forget), would prefer the labor of a slave to negotiating with a free man for his free labor. Because people like to have power over others. This is self evident through out history. This is what politics is, the extension of Man’s ability to have power over his fellow man. For no end, other than that power itself, and how it serve‘s his ego.
So given the nature of politics and the fundamental drives that make it work… why would people think it would be a good idea to distribute the goods of society by it? How could that ever work out well? What could possibly be a worse means of distributive justice?
History shows that usually when politics has been the primary means of determining who gets the goods of society, society as a whole, has stagnated and declined. Those few examples of societies that used merit as the primary means of distributive justice, quickly rose to eminence and declined as quickly in decadence, when they turned back to politics as the means of distributive justice.
Just like a LC circuit (inductive/capacitive). The system oscillates from one state to another with reasonably discernable amplitude and frequency given the known input values. Do societies rise and fall. All due to the pernicious reality that once a society has become “wealthy,” by local standards, it becomes decadent by changing it’s societal myth to include political distributive justice, then turns the incentives that the original societal myth created, they are perverted to become disincentives and that society collapses.
The larger the amplitude the larger the eventual fall (if the path is followed). Historically, when societies have become more and more decadent but retain sufficient military power, they conquer other states and plunder their wealth into their decadent system of political distributive justice. This can stave of the collapse but increases the amplitude. Another way to stave off the collapse, but it still increases the amplitude, is to borrow money from other states. Then plow that money into the corrupt politically driven system of distributive justice and call it “social justice“.
This is one of the biggest reasons there should not be a “World Government.” Such a government, primarily made up of tyrants, would quickly succumb to political mishandling the World’s economy, by implementing political distributive justice (or social justice), world wide. No economy or people would have their property and persons safe from the naked power of political justice. To our mutual detriment…
