Politics and Business

In the early days of the Farm, there was no government. It was a weird combination of monarchy and anarchy. It was Moses and the Exodus. Later on though we had an elected council and chief executive. We also had several mature businesses, The Book Company, Solar Electronics, Farm Foods, The Construction Crew, and the Farming Crew.

There was a private sector and a public sector. Politicians and entrepreneurs. The public sector included the Clinic, the Motor Pool, the Store, the Soy Dairy, the School, etc. It was a small, self-contained world. I knew all the players personally. At one point I attended council meetings as the representative of the Book Company. I was also the CFO and CTO of the Book Company.

I believe I saw there, in that microcosm, how it all works. Politicians always want more power and control and higher taxes. The entrepreneurs want to be left alone. We were spared the phenomenon of businesses getting so big that they start using the government to eliminate their competition. There was no internal competition within our private sector. There was only one Book Company, which competed with the squares outside of the Farm, but not with anyone inside the Farm. The distinction between the two sectors was pretty clearly defined, not a lot of overlap.

Not counting inheritances, the businesses provided the income for the entire Farm. We were commies all the way. There was a constant tension over how much of the money a business got to keep for expenses and expansion. Being commies, the Farm, meaning the elected representatives, starved the businesses and sucked everything they could out of them, to support the public sector.

From what I saw on the Farm, there is an inherent dynamic that propels politicians towards more power, more control, and higher taxes. The government only gets bigger, never smaller. People who win elections believe that that gives them more legitimacy than people who have not won elections. They should, therefore, be able to tell you what to do, because they represent “the people”.

You may agree with them. You may think that’s a good thing. But, like it or not, that attitude inevitably leads to more and more government control. Myself, I wish there were much less government control, of the economy, and of our lives in general.

You could say that the people voted for this current Democratic monopoly of the government, so it’s our own fault. But, obviously, if you look at what is happening in the polls, the people did not vote for massive government overhaul of health care, or for taking over GM and Chrysler, or for the stimulus extravaganza, or for cap and trade, or for investigating the CIA interrogators, again. They didn’t vote for any of this stuff. They don’t like it. They don’t want it. But the politicians are trying to ram it through anyway.

Obama is still pretty popular. I think a majority still believe that he is better equipped than McCain/Palin to run things. It’s his policies that are unpopular. Before the election, I assumed that the fact that we are broke would prevent the government from doing much damage. It never occurred to me that being broke would be used as an excuse to do everything imaginable to become vastly more broke. It’s almost as if they want to run up the debt as fast and hard as possible. What it is really about is more power and more control and more taxes for the political class.