Adam Smith pointed it out, 244 years ago. Among free people, in a free market exchange of goods and services, everyone comes out ahead. Each person gives something he or she values less in return for something he or she values more. Both sides win. I’ve got the Grey Goose. You’ve got the Noilly Prat, the olives, and the crushed ice. Bottoms up!
But in politics only one side can win. What’s at stake in politics isn’t goods and services, it’s power. Power is always zero-sum. When I sell you goods and services I gain something in return. When I sell you power over myself—and that’s the political exchange—I stand to lose everything.
Under the condition of liberty, if you have a swimming pool and a Bentley I can get a swimming pool and a Bentley too. Under the condition of politics, you can drown me in your swimming pool and run me over with your Bentley.
In politics only one side can win. Which is bad. But what’s worse is this means there have to be sides. Faction—angry partisan faction—isn’t a by-product of politics, it is politics. Politics cannot exist without faction. Politics cannot exist without people fighting each other. Put down the free market goods and services pie. Pick up the pie knife of politics.
Freedom brings us all together in the marketplace (although admittedly in a sometimes grumpy way when we see the cash register total). But politics carves us up. Politics pits us against each other. Politics turns us into warring tribes.
Politics hands us the spear of outrage at the slightest perceived slight to our primitive political clan, smears us with the war paint of identity politics, gives us the shield of political correctness, and tells us that we’re not naked savages squatting around a smoldering fire of resentment and envy but noble Social Justice Warriors.
Politics pits one ethnic group against another. And it does it for free. It doesn’t even charge us the way 23andMe or Ancestry.com do.
Politics pits men against women—as if we didn’t have the institution of marriage doing a fine job of that already.
Politics pits immigrants against . . . Against whom? We’re all immigrants. Even Native Americans just got here from the old country, twenty or thirty thousand years ago, which is about a minute before last call on the human migration clock. There’d been people in Africa for a million years.
Finally—and most dangerously—politics pits one generation of Americans against another. The millennials are mad at the baby boomers for soaking up all the Social Security and Medicare gravy while, at the same time, refusing to retire, leaving the millennials to work in a “gig economy” where they make a living by driving each other around for Uber.
There are now more millennial voters than there are OK boomers. And they’ve got Uber to take them to the polls while I’m still trying to figure out how that app works and whether I should get into a car driven by someone who braids her beard.
The younger generation is attracted to an expansion of politics. Partly this is because so many politicians have worked so hard to be assholes, and they obviously need to be politically defeated. But also this is because other politicians have worked so hard to convince millennials that life, like politics, is a zero-sum game. Millennials can’t get more unless they use an expansion of politics (“socialism”) to take more away from . . . if book-sales demographics are anything to go by . . . everybody reading this.
And politics is attracted to an expansion of politics. Indeed, politics, by its own internal logic, is driven to expand. Yet politics fails because it expands.
Politics is like a balloon. Or, rather, it’s like a rolled-up and inflatable latex item all sixteen-year-old boys of my era carried in our wallets (more in hope than in expectation).
Politics at that scale can be a kind of “useful safeguard to liberty.” Even then it doesn’t always prove reliable. A hasty wedding just before high school graduation may ensue.
But, make like a politician instead of a Romeo, and blow a lot of hot air into that inflatable latex item, it gets more fragile yet.
Actually, with politics, it’s worse than the fragility that spawns the occasional bastard. The expansion of politics is hubris, and hence tragic. To overinflate politics is to start out with a Trojan, safe and secure in a little foil pack of constitutionalism, and wind up with the Hindenburg. “Oh the humanity!”
Socialism? It’s not a form of government. In a free country, government may—to a greater or lesser degree—tax, spend, administrate, regulate, provide benefits, and impose stipulations, according to the will of the governed, under the rule of law. Socialism is a law unto itself. Socialism is the politicization of everything. Socialism is when the stakes in the political battle are so high that they include control of the entire socioeconomic system. In this kind of boxing match it’s the referee—the sovereign people of the United States—who’s down for the count.
Socialism has been tried. And tried. We have a proven track record of how it goes. A track record that’s more than a century long as of the October 2017 one hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. That went well.
So how is it that so many young, fresh, new voters and so many politicians—not so young but full of fresh, new ambition—are suddenly in love with socialism and unworried about its consequences?
Ed Crane, founder of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, emailed me a joke swiped from the Internet that explains it as well as anything does.
A libertarian walks into a bar at 9:58 p.m., and happens to sit down on a bar stool next to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The libertarian stares up at the
