Humans are stupid. Just ask a legislator. The more progressive the legislator, the dumber you are. We know this to be true because of the things they try to legislate. That would be “every” thing. You are simply not bright enough to manage much if anything without their aid or influence.
Ironically, the cure for this human stupidity is to convince a majority of the aforementioned dolts to elect you to a public office. The more progressive the legislator the smarter and more sophisticated your transformation.
You go from carbon-based animal barely able to choose the proper flush toilet or to make healthy choices from the menu to economic expert, social engineer, and savior of the dumb-ass doltish herd you were but a few moments ago huddled with in ignorance.
(Bastiat quotes are coming.)
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
Once in office, the solution to everything requires the taking of other people’s money. The money they are smart enough to earn but not smart enough to spend because it too frequently is on things not important to legislators.
Suppose I conceive of a system for the organization of labor. To set forth my system and wait for men to adopt it if it is good, would be to assume that the initiative lies with them. But in the system that I am examining, the initiative lies with the legislator. “The legislator,” as Rousseau says, “should feel strong enough to transform human nature.” Hence, what I should aspire to is to become a legislator, in order to impose on mankind a social order of my own invention.
And at their significant expense.
What is an idiot to do?
Become a legislator and join the elevated class of humans who by virtue of being chosen by some majority of mediocre nincompoops are now magically less of a dullard than those who picked them.
Choose legislators who believe you (sometimes referred to as We the People) are actually smarter than they are. Individuals who seek the role not to take more of your money (and the political power that goes with it – for without your money government has no power) but to limit the taking and wherever possible try to give as much of it back as they can.
Keep the power closer to you. Keep the money closer to you. Give you the opportunity to engage locally in the collection and expenditure of your earnings for fewer and limited purposes.
Because, lest you forget, America has 50 State governments, complete with plunderers looking to do as much meddling as any people could ever need. Far away but not quite so far.
Just below them, we’ve got county and local “governments” with more than our fair share of high-minded politicians. Much closer than state politicians and light years nearer than those down in DC.
Above that, we’ve got THE federal government whose role was supposed to be to handle the few things the states themselves were not as likely to handle independently of their own interest. HUman nature being what it is.
Politicians who want the government to do less and to do more of it closer to home are few and far between at every level.
But whatever the post, it all comes untangled when you accept that even the best of us ultimately act in our own self-interest whether we are legislators or not. The difference is that joe and jane citizen can’t use the law to steal from their neighbors to advance a self-interest while legislators can and do.
You do not change human nature by elevating someone in public office, so it is in your own self-interest to elevate individuals who are more inclined to trust you than they are the offices to which they seek. And to quickly replace them when it becomes clear that while they may have had good intentions going in (or claimed them as a means of getting the dopes to check their box on a ballot) the system has appealed to the worst in human nature to pollute them and it is time to bring them home.
Very few countries have the tools to do this effectively.
Incumbents are forever looking for ways to numb or abrogate those tools.
But then that’s just human nature.
The solution to which is less government, not more.
