Dear Friends,
It seems to me, the perennial question in politics is, what comes first the money in politics or the corruption? That question misses the point however, if the power of the state hadn’t grown to the magnitude and reach it has, there wouldn’t be much money in politics to begin with. People are always and everywhere self interested, in some places their self interest is tied up with tribal interests, other places self interest is bound with family, while in Western cultures self interest is about the self. No matter how self interest is defined by the culture, if it is more profitable to pay a government crony to get rich, rather than produce a product or service your fellow human beings need and want for profit, people will choose to bribe a public servant every time. There is a saying in modern business that a dollar spent on lobbying is worth ten on product development. What a damning thing to say about government’s corrupt influence on the economy. Yet there it is, it is more profitable to spend money on politics than to develop a product people want and can use.
In a market economy the path to riches is by producing something that improves the lives of others. That truism has two main outcomes, one is that the standard of living is constantly under improvement due to the introduction of labor saving and life enhancing products produced by entrepreneurs, and two, those who get rich do so by helping their fellows. This is why the market economy is so effective and efficient. When the self interested path to wealth is by improving the lot of Man, people who want to get rich will improve the lot of Man. What a simple concept to understand.
Most people who want to get rich however don’t want to go to such lengths, they would rather just steal the wealth through confiscation, government granted monopoly or outright corruption. Those in government see the wealth of the nation and in their hubris and greed they want an ever larger share of that wealth. Basically, sociopaths and psychopaths don’t want to help people, but want to get rich, so they turn to government. This is one of the reasons it is in the nature of government to grow. People who seek unearned wealth need to convince those they are stealing from, that it is in the best interests of the victims, so they connive and poison.
They connive to trick the mark into willingly giving up their sovereignty for “fairness,” “safety,” or shared sacrifice,” but it is only the people who sacrifice, the elite slop at the trough of government largess and the poor only get the slop that is tossed onto the ground, in the elite’s feeding frenzy. Politicians and lawyers poison the economy, to create the conditions where people are more and more desperate, because desperate people don’t think they act on emotion and emotional people are easily manipulated. So the power of government grows and grows, while the wealth of the nation shrinks and shrinks, and as the power of government to interfere with the economy, poison it if you will, it becomes ever more efficient to feed the leviathan than be fed to it.
As the power of government grows more money is fed into the machine. It becomes less and less profitable to produce a product or service that benefits people and more profitable to pay government to shut down your competition. Those in business can’t take the chance their competitors will pay government to shut them down through regulation, so they have to belly up to the bar, paying government not to close their doors. The corruption, power and influence of government grows and grows, in the arms race of businesses to keep ahead of their competition. In the meantime, money that would have gone into product development is spent instead on lobbying and political donations, therefore less products are available and demand for labor decreases, lowering wages and the labor participation rate.
So the question of, what comes first the money in politics or the corruption misses the point. It is the unchecked growth in government reach and influence that drives both. People will seek the easiest means to wealth available, and if that means is political power they will choose that route, especially sociopaths and psychopaths, that is why government is filled with them. Just because they are pathological doesn’t mean they are stupid, so they convince the people, or at least some of the people, they would benefit by more power in the hands of government. Once government has the power to destroy whole industries, create laws forcing people into markets and poison the economy, it is more efficient for business to pay government than to produce products and services. Once a nation gets there the economy can only rot away like moldy bread. The real problem is abandoning limited government for the nanny state, it always has been, and always will be.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
