“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” — George Bernard Shaw

There are similarities between competing special interests for government largess, some liberal constituencies some conservative.

The common denominator is – government. It maintains the goodies that can then be distributed to supplicants. The payments to the members of the government who control the goodie-bag gain power and prestige, use of private planes, money for their charitable favorites (which n turn provide power and prestige), and contacts for their “retirement years.” (One only has to look at LBJ, Bill Clinton, Good-Time Charlie Rangel, etc. to see people who enter government with shiny seats and scuffed shoes and die multi-millionaires.)

The common denominator between supplicant special interests from the right and the left, is the government, which can grant special privilege – without such granting powers elected government officials are mere corporate middle-managers, collecting a salary for moving paper and people to perform a task. With special privilege, they are mini-dictators, granting favors.

A quick look at the voluminous tax code will show that almost everyone has claimed a special exemption – and providing both whip (tax law) and exemption (carrot) are both government functions – rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

The so-called fight between labor and corporations is reflective of the problem. Labor gets legislators to pass laws permitting or requiring labor organizing or otherwise punishing business. Government and labor both have more power in enforcing the rules, and business less power. Business than gets its legislators to devise rules limiting union power or otherwise benefitting business and punishing labor. Government and business now have more power in enforcing the rules, and labor less power.

The winner in both cases is government, and the loser in each case is either business or labor – both business and labor are both weaker because they have smacked the other…and government is stronger.

That tug between labor and business is duplicated in many tugs between other competing interests – environmentalists and power plants, mass transit and freeway proponents, the list is endless.

Each side uses government to gain some perceived benefit, and punish its opponent, and in every case the grantor of privilege and the wielder of punishment is the ever growing government because it holds the power to grant or deny. And in every case, the seekers of privilege are happy losers in the end because they have gained temporary advantage.

 

“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
—  George Bernard Shaw

 

Moving In The Right Direction — Unfortunately It’s New Mexico

Apropos my last comments on the CFL lighting, now comes a Republican Governor who gets it – in New Mexico:

“Martinez, who replaced Democrat Bill Richardson, announced on Tuesday that she is removing all members of New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board because of what she said was its “anti-business” policies. After a heated debate, the board last year approved measures to limit the emissions of the state’s largest polluters and to join the regional cap-and-trade program.”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/01/cap-and-trade-new-mexico-global-warming-climate-change.html

Of course California will go in the opposite direction, throttling business with greater environmental rules – but I still think even Jerry Brown will, at some point, get the word that these environmental bills are hurting the job market and hurting the economy of California – with negligible impact on whatever the Global Warming crowd thinks is causing whatever they think is being caused.