In
a recent article on CNN.com Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at
Princeton University, laments that disillusioned young people may be losing
their faith in politics as result of their many disappointments with the Obama
era. Professor Zeilzer implores
politicians of both parties to “show that you can make progress on the policy
issues that matter to them and to do so through a stronger political process
that leads them to believe in politics once again.”
What might that mean to make young people “believe in
politics once again”? What are politics
anyway and why should anyone invest faith in them?
The political economist, Franz Oppenheimer framed
the meaning of “politics” very succinctly.
“I propose in the
following discussion to call one’s own labor, and the equivalent exchange of
one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the
satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of
others will be called the ‘political means’.” *
In other words hard work, cooperation, innovation, risk
taking and free exchange are the “economic” means of producing the necessities
and the niceties of life. The political
means are to obtain said goods from the producers by coercion and force. In plain English, theft.
It can only be a good thing if coercion and theft are
getting a bad name.
The essence of the political process is the redistribution
material resources from the caste of tax payers (producers) to tax consumers
(non-producers).
As Murray Rothbard puts it:
“the government budgetary process is a
coercive shift of resources and incomes from producers on the market to
nonproducers; it is also a coercive interference with the free choices of
individuals by those constituting the government……. No longer do income and
wealth flow purely from service rendered on the market; they now flow to
special privilege created by the State and away from those specially burdened
by the State.”
Man,
Economy, and State with Power and Market: The Scholar's Edition
When one wonders why the political process is so stalemated,
it is because the cumulative government theft (federal, state and local) has
become so exorbitant that there is no longer room for leeway. Overextended governments want to extract more
and more from overburdened, unemployed and underemployed citizens.
America has calcified into two irreconcilable castes. It may have taken only a little theft to
sustain the State in bygone years. Now
it takes almost all that we have got.
Neither party offers relief. They
both take and redistribute, each to its own clientele. There is no room anymore for politics.
Back in the Eighties Sting sang that “There is no political
solution to our troubled evolution”. He was dead on. A civilization based upon theft is immoral, unsustainable
and destructive.
*See more at: http://www.masterresource.org/2011/06/economic-vs-political-means-oppenheimer/#sthash.eSPUDtsG.dpuf
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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
