Constitutional Amendments Say No

[peristaltor]

Some time ago, I asked the forum in the Friday Lulz tradition to imagine a world where money was excluded from the political arena. Few bit, most of those dismissed, probably for the same reason that people don't sit around dreaming of what the sky would look like green instead of blue.

Ah, it turns out (through NPR, of all places) that others

Comments

[montecristo]

First off, there is a vast difference between money and power. Money can buy power, where there are concentrations of it for sale, but the fact of wealth, in and of itself, is not the same thing as using force to violate the rights of others. The fact that someone owns four sports cars and I own one high-mileage sedan is not a violation of my rights, not where the market is allowed to function freely. Wealth can only exist through production. It is most easily and morally created through voluntary exchange. Power has only one moral, legitimate use: defense, which means much of politics, throughout history, has been an attempt by individuals and groups to live outside of and above the moral law. As Franz Oppenheimer correctly noted: there are two means to the acquisition of wealth: the economic means, via production through mutual cooperation and trade or the political means, which means, predation, expropriation, and theft

[peristaltor]

I strongly disagree.

[chron_job]

> The fact that someone owns four sports cars and I own one high-mileage

[montecristo]

Your complaint is a common one in economic circles. It is the product of folk economic thinking. I call it the "Capitalists Will Buy Up the World and Eject Us Into Space" fallacy. If your complaint had a basis then why haven't "greedy capitalists" bought up even a small state in the U.S., say Rhode Island, and made evil "superfortunes" through various forms of "market blackmail." The problem underlying this fallacy is the failure to realize that all trade involves an exchange of values. As trade occurs, the market changes and values are reaasessed. The reason that it would be impossible for "capitalists" to buy up all of the land is that they could not offer anything in exchange that all other present landowners would consider more valuable than all of the land they would hypothetically be trading away. Where would a capitalist aquire such wealth in the first place? What other planet could a hypothetical capitalist trade to the rest of humanity to acquire the entirety of this one? Consider this: one of the richest men on Earth, Bill