(Lord of) The Flies

Glenn has an excellent column up today:

It's takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning | Glenn Harlan Reynolds | Columnists | Washington Examiner: "In a world of bailouts and crony capitalism - which is to say, in the world we live in today - a rational businessperson has to compare the return on investment between improving a product or service, or lobbying the government for goodies.

Frequently, the latter looks better:  If you spend $1 million on lobbying, and get a $1 billion subsidy from the government, that’s a thousand-fold return on your money.

It’s hard to do one-hundredth as well through actual capitalism.  So why bother to improve your products at all?  Just hire more lobbyists."

Which brings us to where Madison had it wrong in Federalist #10 when he said:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Clearly Madison's hopes for the limitation of the spread of bad ideas by the impediment of scale have been negated by the rise of the two party (tweedle-dee-jackass/ tweedle-dumbo) system which Washington warned about in his farewell address.

And ironically, the improvements in communication and transportation technologies that the Framer's couldn't have foreseen have worked to the advantage of operating large organizations -- including political parties.

And notice that all the things that Madison hoped would be forestalled have come true in spades.

Paper money? Check.

Bailouts? Check.

Redistribution of wealth? Check.

Sigh.

Glenn puts it in today's terms:

When the crisis comes, and it will, we should relearn the lesson that the Framers of our Constitution knew and tried to embody: The bigger and more powerful the national government is, the more prone it is to corruption and interest-group domination.

A federal government that actually operated within the limits intended by the Framers would be much smaller, much less capable of creating economic distortion, and much less attractive to moochers and the politicians they enable. The bigger the pot of honey, the more flies it attracts.

Humans as a swarm of flies on the long decaying corpse of the republic? Check.

I'm always amazed by the liberal progressive collectivist's professed belief that business monopolies are bad but yet somehow the biggest monopolies of them all -- governments that have slaughtered on an unimaginable scale -- are good because they will (though pixie dust?) be somehow finally stocked with the "new man" freed of his base "selfish" nature.

In other words, we can take a world full of big, bad business monopolies stocked with bad, bad (did I mention racist?) people and and move all those people into the government monopoly and all will be transformed. Just like the Soviet Union and North Korea ... no wait!

To put it charitably: What a crock.