It is the battle cry of the Populists; get the money out of politics.  It corrupts the system, giving undeserved power to big corporations & wealthy individuals.  Reform campaign financing.  Why indeed one of Presidential candidates has built a cornerstone of his candidacy on attempting to do that.  People everywhere decry the corrupting influence of money on our political system.  How do we get the money out of politics; the question echoes across the land.

I submit to you, as so many things are in our herd-like mentally society, is the wrong question.  The real question is how do we get the politicians out of the money?  Subtly, yet with dramatic seminal moments, the politicians have embedded themselves so deeply in our economic system that they now exercise a degree of control over our economic activity that curdles the blood of the Founding Fathers.

Economically the success, freedom, and vitality of the United States are the result of capitalism, the free & unfettered exchange of goods and services amongst its citizenry.  In our founding, the government was given little control over it, and when it was it was usually from the direction of keeping government from interfering with our economic lives. 

It is obvious that to rule the people, what you really need to do is control their economic activity.  The political class are Type Ones, they are driven to rule. So to accomplish their goal, what they really need to do is control the economic activity of the citizenry.  

Intrinsically, business could care less about the government; they need to satisfy the wants and needs of consumers to be successful.  The politician wanting money can go pound sand.  At least that is the way it should be (and was supposed to be).  But once they gained rule over the economic engine, they became in all too many ways more important to businesses success than consumers.

Case in point, and this is just one of millions, the compact florescent light bulb (CFL)They came onto the marketplace maybe a dozen years ago.  They were pitched as a money saver.  I checked them out, figured out how much I could save with their use (on a light-by-light basis) and quickly concluded they were usefully in situations where:

a.) the light was used a lot, and/or the fixture was relatively inaccessible.

b.) the light fixture was large enough to accommodate the bulb

c.) and the bulb was either hidden from view or was in a spot where looks did not matter.

So, I purchased a few of these bulbs and was a happy contented consumer.  Obviously it made sense for the bulk of the bulbs I used to be the 50 cent incandescent variety and not the 8 dollar CFL type.  But boy would those light bulb makers like me to buy $8 CFLs; that would raise their income significantly.  So, when the free exchange of goods and services won’t work, lobby the government to over-ride capitalism.  Spend millions of dollars in legislatures, and gain billions in profits.  And so it was under the guise over “man-made global climate change” (more on this subject in future articles), the government has mandated that we spend vast sums more for a product we don’t want; yielding profits that are not deserved, and increasing the power of the Type Ones.

The moral of the story:  to get the money out of politics, we need to get politics out of the money.