Government wastes power on a large-scale.
What do I mean by this statement?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘power’ as follows: “The
capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the
course of events”.[1]
On the free-market, money is power. When you have money, you
can pay other people to do things for you. With money, you can get people to
willingly and happily cook you dinner, build you a house, clean your stuff,
entertain you, and much more. With money, you can purchase items of physical
property and real estate which you can freely use and dispose of according to
your own arbitrary whim. With money, you can support your favorite charitable causes and help to improve the
material standard of living of people that you care about. On the free-market,
those with money are the customers, and the ‘customer is king’.
But now the government comes along and takes away your money
without asking your permission; it ‘taxes’ you. By taking away your money, it
takes away your power and aggrandizes its own. Do you get anything out of this
transaction? Yes, you get a ‘vote’, you get a ‘say’, regarding what to do with
the power the government has appropriated from you and from everyone else it
taxes.
Unfortunately, your vote and your voice is only one of,
usually, multiple millions; your lone voice often lost amidst the wrangling of
special interest groups, or ‘reinterpreted’ by politicians and bureaucrats in
between elections. If your chosen ‘faction’ does not emerge victorious in the
political contest, all the power will accrue, for the next period, to people
you didn’t even nominally support. Your puny voice has an almost infinitesimally
small influence on the course of the political machine.
But surely the lost power must end up in someone’s hands, you
might think. Not necessarily. Lesser bureaucrats must to a certain extent adhere
to the commands of greater bureaucrats; greater bureaucrats must to a certain
extent adhere to the commands of their political masters; the politicians must to
a certain extent adhere to the commands of the voters and their special
interest groups; the voters and their special interest groups must form awkward
coalitions and endlessly compromise in order to exert any influence. Where can
we find that glorious power enjoyed by the consumer with money on the
free-market, which the government has taken away? Nowhere; that power has been
twisted, diluted, and made to compromise by the political process; so much so
that it has become unrecognizable. The kind of real, individualized power enjoyed
by the consumer on the free-market does not accrue to anyone in particular in the
political process. Individuals lose their power at the expense of the collectivized,
political machine.
Real, individualized power is a fine thing. Almost everyone
desires it; and possessing it is a key component of human happiness. It allows
us seemingly puny individuals to have a real impact on the world; in a way that
is both meaningful and beneficial to us. Can being a minuscule cog in a
gigantic, powerful political machine really compare to this kind of
individualized power? Can anyone really maintain that they feel more powerful
as a voter with an infinitesimally small amount of influence on the use of a
large amount of concentrated power, than they do as a consumer, even with a
modest amount of money, with real power over a small, but personally meaningful,
portion of the world? I suspect that when most people interact with the
political process, they don’t feel empowered like they would if they had disposable
income to spend. Rather, they feel a profound sense of powerlessness; I know,
at any rate, that I do.
If so, then what the government does, when it aggrandizes
itself, is to substitute the real power enjoyed by individuals on the
free-market for a sense of powerlessness these same individuals experience when
faced with the political machine to which this power has accrued. Individualized
power, this precious commodity that makes most individuals feel important and
happy, is wasted by the government, which transforms it into miserable
collectivized political power.
That is why I say that the government wastes power on a
large-scale. In order to bring back the benefits of some of this real power
wasted, we must reclaim our lost power from the wasteful hands of the
government and diffuse it once again among individual people interacting on a
free-market.
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