Santa Claus Politics

Monty Pelerin / EconomicNoise.com

Our political system has deteriorated into two parties competing by playing Santa Claus against each other. The winner of elections is generally the party who successfully out-promised the other. The recent election was the most obvious and most blatant example of such behavior.

Judge Napolitano described this behavior:

What is going on is the present-day proof of the truism observed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who rarely agreed on anything in public: When the voters recognize that the public treasury has become a public trough, they will send to Washington not persons who will promote self-reliance and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, but rather those who will give away the most cash and thereby create dependency. This is an attitude that, though present in some localities in the colonial era, was created at the federal level by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, magnified by FDR, enhanced by LBJ, and eventually joined in by all modern-day Democrats and most contemporary Republicans.

Sadly, there is no political way to reverse this process. Politicians will not willingly give up their vote-buying schemes. History has no examples of this happening. History does tell how it happens, however. It happens in an implosion of society, likely triggered by an economic collapse.

http://www.economicnoise.com/2012/11/18/santa-claus-politics/