David Foster links to an excellent summary essay by Richard Fulmer about groups putting energy into economic activity rather than political activity. Politics is necessarily redistributive, creating no new wealth. The continuing misunderstanding by socialists and much of the left that the amount of wealth is somehow just present, and equity can only come from taking it from A to give to B. Economic thinking casts a wider net on getting wealth, including direct creation of something that was not there minutes before.
Those who had to rely on markets and education were, in a grim irony, forced into the more productive path. Markets reward productivity. Politics rewards coalition-building, favor-trading, and the ability to extract value from others.
Politicians, especially on the left believe "Only we can save you. Elect us and we will get you your fair share. There is no other path." Unions will insist "We got you the weekend and the forty-hour week." That is less than half true. They could not have done this if there were not new wealth to draw from. They were not useless, and the service they provide must be achieved somehow. But they did not create a penny of it. You can't export the practice to places that aren't producing wealth - there is nothing to share.
2 comments:
"Politics is necessarily redistributive, creating no new wealth."
I agree with your general point, but I'm not sure this is true necessarily. The Civilian Conservation Corps, for example, created a lot of trained personnel as well as a lot of infrastructure that we might reasonably consider "new wealth." Many of those things (e.g, the Blue Ridge Parkway) continue to produce new wealth, in fact, by drawing tourism dollars. But the economy in general was enriched by the increased pool of skilled labor, which was then available to be leveraged by the private market as well. So the initial redistribution was fairly limited, but the wealth creation seems to have been real enough -- at least to me.
Less emphatically, the TVA created a lot of wealth by its electricity infrastructure -- though it was much more intensely redistributive, steali... er, I mean, through eminent domain claims on poor people's family farms on a very wide scale.
That works. Government interventions are good at picking off the low-hanging fruit of fixing things.
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