"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner." - H.L. Mencken

Politics = Exploitation

Government can’t give you anything without taking from someone else first.

'Rent seeking' is one of the most important insights in the last fifty years of economics and, unfortunately, one of the most inappropriately labeled. Gordon Tullock originated the idea in 1967, and Anne Krueger introduced the label in 1974. The idea is simple but powerful. People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena. They typically do so by getting a subsidy for a good they produce or for being in a particular class of people, by getting a tariff on a good they produce, or by getting a special  regulation that hampers their competitors. Elderly people, for example, often seek higher Social Security payments; steel producers often seek restrictions on imports of steel; and licensed electricians and doctors often lobby to keep regulations in place that restrict competition from unlicensed electricians or doctors. (click here for more)

All that 'giving' comes with costs. All of it is done in the name of 'The Common Interest' but realistic objective assessment should cause people to ask if waste, fraud, abuse and failure really is a 'common interest'. Reports about bribery, theft, graft, kickbacks, political influence peddling, insider trading, criminal cover-ups and more are fairly common. Just whose interests are served by government action? Is it to your benefit or your cost? Is government your solution or your problem? Would you be better off with less of it?

Government at all levels are fiscally strained and face the prospect of insolvency and debt default. Even in the happiest of scenarios, America will continue moving backward...while more realistically, America is almost sure to face economic, financial, and social calamity in the near term. States, cities, municipalities and schools have debts as well. Some of them are now at or near defaulting on their debts. You can see examples here and here. The Tragedy Of The Commons has arrived. Big government will have a harder time dispensing favors and redistributing people’s wealth as more of them resist the costs. That is when democracy has failed.

To prevent debt default elected local governments are replaced with unelected 'fiscal control boards' representing the interests of creditors who naturally don't want to be fleeced by debtors. Central bankers serve this function at the national level. In the US that is the Federal Reserve Bank. For Euro zone countries the European Central Bank decides what Greece will do irrespective of how the Greek people vote because Greek democracy bankrupted itself and is unable to pay the cost of benefits they voted for themselves. We, the People can still vote. But the money issues are decided by bankers. This may resemble a democracy - but it isn't.

Rationalizations come in many forms with different names and varied moral distinctions. But the results are still the same: 

The Common Interest becomes The Tragedy Of The Commons

How can Tragedy be a Common interest?

Click here for benefits.
Click here for Costs ; here for more Costs ; here for still more Costs.
Click here for examples of conflict and decline.
Click here for small government solution examples.

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