Students in the state’s official propaganda institutions
learn about the wonders of the democratic process, so called, throughout
their years of formal study. But the truth is on full display during a
presidential election season. These are not wise statesmen, discussing
matters of importance from a disinterested, platonic summit, but narcissistic
power-seekers shoveling ill-gotten gains to favored constituencies.
Elections have sometimes been compared to markets: just as firms compete
for consumer dollars, political candidates compete for citizens’ votes. But
the comparison is a superficial one.
When the consumer spends his dollar, he is guaranteed to receive what he
purchases. So he researches that big-screen television, or automobile, or
tablet, or smartphone. He considers his options and decides which one best
suits his needs. He perceives the benefits that accrue to him from his
purchase, and he is also aware of their cost. He immediately reaps the
benefits of a wise purchase, and immediately suffers the loss associated with
an unwise purchase.
When the citizen casts his vote, he gets what he votes for only if 50
percent of the rest of the population votes for the same candidate he does.
So he may not in fact suffer any adverse consequences from a poorly cast
vote. Likewise, the politician he chooses may win but not carry through on
his promises. Again, there is no direct feedback mechanism for the voter the
way there is for the buyer on the market, who immediately reaps the benefits
of an informed decision and suffers the consequences of a decision made from
ignorance. And although he perceives the alleged benefits bestowed by the
state, he has no idea what their cost is.
And of course, there is zero chance that one person’s vote will decide an
election. As a result, a voter has no reason to bother researching his
options, nor entering the government booth to begin with. He may cast
his vote on the most superficial basis, the kind of basis on which he would
never rest his decision to purchase a consumer good.
Meanwhile, and by stark contrast, those pressure groups that expect and
intend to extract favors and loot from the state apparatus know every last
detail about the state, its personnel, and its activities.
Because it is so unlike the market economy, politics operates according to
perverse principles. Instead of reason and evidence, political campaigns
appeal to emotion and irrationality. Consultants labor obsessively to uncover
just
the right combinations of words and images to project an attractive package
to the voting public. Meanwhile, when a candidate in an unguarded moment
thoughtlessly utters a truthful statement, you can be sure each of his rivals
will solemnly denounce it, and that it will be formally retracted within 24
hours.
This is why it was such a thrill to watch Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012
election cycles. If you want to raise money and win votes, political
consultants would say, then flatter your audience, avoid specifics, speak in
platitudes, weep over your love for America, and so on. But Ron gave honest,
unrehearsed answers to whatever he was asked, and paid no attention to focus
groups or political fashion.
And this is precisely why Ron raised all the money he did. In the fourth
quarter of 2011, remember, Ron led the entire GOP pack in fundraising.
Who else in political life was saying that the Fed, far from the savior of
the economy, was the cause of the boom-bust cycle? Who else would denounce the
drug war even in the most conservative states? Who else described peace and
nonintervention as moral imperatives, and called the warfare state a racket
through and through?
This is what got Ron noticed. These were opinions no one had ever heard in
political life before. Had there ever been so principled a
noninterventionist? The very idea of nonintervention as a consistent
philosophy had never before found a place in the American foreign policy
debate, which had always revolved around degrees and forms of intervention.
And certainly no one had ever made the Fed a political issue, or opposed it
vociferously and on principle.
In that way, Ron became a phenomenon without any deliberate effort on his
part. In the course of ignoring the conventional wisdom on what to say and
how to act during a campaign, Ron generated so much enthusiasm and
fundraising that politicians started coming out of the woodwork to implore
him to share his secrets. What new trick had he discovered? I just told the
truth, Ron told his dejected inquirers.
He accomplished this because he was so radically unlike the other
candidates – in 2012 or in any other year. He did not expect to fool people
into voting for him by being coy or inconsistent in his views, or by
compromising just enough, in the vain hope that the party establishment would
give him a fair hearing.
Whether it’s the surveillance state, Federal Reserve inflation, or the
latest chapter in the ludicrous and self-defeating “War on Terror,” the
highest-ranking people in both parties can be counted on to demonize
dissident voices. The official media, in turn, with anyone even slightly
unorthodox now out of the picture, then pretends that the American public is
faced with a grave and dramatic choice.
It never is, of course. It was Republican think-tanks, for example, that
had been pushing the individual mandate, the very heart of Obamacare, years
before the election of Barack Obama. Neither candidate will have a
fundamental objection to the Federal Reserve, so the most important economic
institution in the country, and certainly the most damaging, won’t even be
discussed, much less challenged or actually abolished. And there will
assuredly be no departure from the consistent, bipartisan foreign policy of
war and empire.
So whatever the electoral outcome, the wars will be the same, the bailouts
will be the same, the monetary policy will be the same, the surveillance will
be the same, the “economic stimulus” will be the same – and by now, anyone
paying attention knows it. The alleged experts who observe, handicap, and
analyze our presidential races pretend not to know it, but since their job is
to preserve the illusion of choice, that’s no surprise.
This is why a truth-telling political blog can do some good: it punctures
the abiding myths of the American political system and the media classes that
perpetuate them. For that reason, I’ve resurrected the one-man Political Theatre blog
I launched in 2011. I’ll be following the race from now until the bitter end,
so be sure to join me there!
Even if, per impossibile, a candidate were elected who favored
slashing and abolishing everything in sight, he’d be up against the
entrenched interests of millions of government employees, all of whose
livelihoods depend on defeating his best efforts. One of the most
preposterous of Karl Marx’s ideas was that the state has no interests of its
own – it was merely an instrument by which the ruling class exploits everyone
else, and nothing more.
But what could be more obvious than the utter falsity of this claim? It
was exploded in the USSR itself, where the bureaucracy was consistently
looking out for its own interests, ideology be damned. In the US and
elsewhere, the situation is much the same: an entrenched bureaucracy seeks
ever more power and resources for the sake of perpetuating its own existence.
Meanwhile, we are solemnly assured that this preposterous display
constitutes the very best political system available to man (it’s “the worst
system except for all the others,” a wag famously said), which means that in
following this spectacle over the next 18 months, we are observing the state
at its best. If this is the state at its best, isn’t it time to make
the leap to anarcho-capitalism?
