The Politics Of Personal Power (Part Two) – Election Day
This special double-sized Election Day episode focuses upon the mindset we might consider in the voting booth if our focus is to maximize personal power. It's a long one, because these concepts are a bit complicated. We cover four more precepts that help guide us in the direction of empowering policy.
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The Politics Of Personal Power (Part Two) – Election Day
Do you vote? Why or why not? How much do our elected officials' actions align with their words and their constituents' wishes? Can the system be trusted? The reasons for doubt are many, but that doesn't change a basic fact of life. Our personal power is a function of the choices we make. Most of those choices are about the thoughts and beliefs we choose to accept. Those choices help determine the emotions we feel, which in turn guide our actions, which deliver results, which are the prime determinants of our life circumstances. We don't operate in a vacuum. Some of our choices are restricted by the laws and norms of the society in which we live.
Our personal resources are reduced by the agreed upon and necessary, but nevertheless, coerced percentage we must delegate to publicly shared functions through taxation. In societies that feature representative governance, we do have a say in these matters. That's what elections are for. If we choose not to pay attention or we're cynical about the system and the process, and thus we don't participate, we bleed our power as we silence our own voices and leave policy decisions that affect our lives to the whims and wills of others.
If we want our full agency, it follows that we must embrace the responsibilities of citizenship. In our technologically connected world, that task has been rendered both easier and more difficult. Why? It's easier because information is more readily available. There are fewer secrets. In some ways, it's more difficult for corrupt leaders to operate in the shadows with impunity. When something significant happens, meaning it affects public trust and/or treasure, we tend to find out immediately. News is available in thousands of outlets and forms. That's also the difficulty because news is a curated product.
Information is more readily available. There are fewer secrets. In some ways, it's more difficult for corrupt leaders to operate in the shadows with impunity.
We hear news stories. Stories are narratives. They're meant to convey a point. That point is nearly invariably subjective. Often their messages serve an ideology. We saw the problems with that in part one when our ideology is the only lens through which we can see, as is the case a lot of the time, we emotionally resonate with stories that support our current view. That's where we point our eyes and ears. In the fewer and fewer moments when we're exposed to stories that conflict with our chosen ideology, we're tone-deaf to the message.
In this playing field, our system of information dissemination and by extension governance has degenerated into a team sport. Deeper truth and paradigm-expanding understanding is one of the casualties in this arrangement. In the resulting darkness, the opportunity for increased power for authorities and the corruption that accompanies it expands. The complexity of the system compounds the difficulty for individuals as we try to function as responsible citizens. What are we to do?
In part one, we focused on four precepts that are in our direct control. To review, they are, 1) Free yourself from ideological possession, cultivate humility in what you think you know and the curiosity to learn more. 2) Vote with your dollars as well as your ballots. 3) Watch the fourth estate. Make sure to watchdog corruption and not participate in it. 4) Respect for all people as individuals, not as members of this or that demographic group.
Now, we'll take a deeper dive into the precepts to guide us toward representation that helps us as responsible citizens maximize our agency. We won't look at specific policies. We're considering principles we expect our leaders to espouse and follow as they make policy and codify law. Neither of the parties fully align with them. Whether your narrative leans left, right, or neither, these precepts apply when among our priorities as a society is to maximize personal agency and thus, all the other gifts life has to offer for the greatest number of people.
Personal power precept number five, minimize central control. Brilliant thinkers throughout the history of civilization have wrestled with the question of how best to organize the political function of a society. They've come up with a spectrum of ideas, most of which have been employed, and all of them with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages where the attempt is to grant as much independence to individuals as possible.
The classic conundrum with the approaches known thus far is this. How do we invest leaders with power while at the same time limiting their ability to abuse it? Some of that abuse happens because of the basic nature of humans. We value people's interests with falling priorities as our circle of concern expands, first from ourselves to our loved ones, to the people we identify with our tribe, and then to everybody else. People in power are no different than anybody else. They should be expected to follow the same method of prioritization.
Another challenge in designing the best society is that leaders must act with limited knowledge. We don't always elect our best and brightest. The truth is it wouldn't make that big a difference if we did. Why? It's because no matter how smart we are, we know next to nothing compared to all there is to know. When it comes to policy, whether it be strategic, economic, or social, there's no way to know the opportunity costs and unintended consequences for any course of action.
In every single decision, there are trade-offs. Some are known and can be intelligently discussed. Most are unknown and can only be known through experience. That's the value of studying history. It's worth a closer look at the observable phenomenon. The further removed authorities are from their constituents, the less responsive they are to their wishes and interests. This is one reason the American founding featured federalism, which in theory left as much power in the hands of localities and states as practical and assigned power to the federal government in limited ways.
Personal Power: The further removed authorities are from their constituents, the less responsive they are to their wishes and interests.
This system has, as the founders knew it would, eroded over time. So concerned they were about this, they built into the new system a way to regulate central power with a series of checks and balances. Their first innovation was a bicameral legislature answerable to both the people and the states charged with lawmaking and entrusted with the public treasury. Ultimately, committees, no matter how they're comprised or how well-intentioned their members, are inefficient and incongruent in their leadership.
Accordingly, the founders entrusted the actual running of the government to an executive branch to make sure neither entity went outside of its constitutionally established limits. They established a judicial branch headed by the Supreme Court. This arrangement has worked well over the past two and a half centuries making America the longest surviving continual democratic republic in world history. That's putting the achievement too mildly. There's never been a nation that has done more to elevate the quality of life for as many people around the world as America has done. That's because the system, more than any other before since, unleashed the creative power of individuals free to cooperate toward mutually beneficial ends.
How much longer it will stay that way remains to be seen as it is under nearly continual assault from internal and external forces that prefer not to be so restricted. The more we rely upon government to regulate and support desirable functions, the more power we place in the hands of the people in authority. That power comes from only one place, the personal power of its citizens to maximize individual sovereignty choice and continue to be hospitable for creativity and innovation. Government must be limited in what it does.
Over the course of my lifetime, it's been moving in the opposite direction. In 1961, the year I was born, the federal expenditure was about $80 billion. For fair comparison, we'll have to adjust for inflation. That's about $750 billion in 2023's dollars. The 2022 expenditure is under $6.3 trillion. That's roughly 8.5 times more. This does not tell the entire story because the government like individuals also doesn't operate in a vacuum. To make a higher quality comparison, we must also consider government expenditure as a percentage of the entire economy expressed as the GDP or Gross Domestic Product.
In 1961, the GDP was $562 billion. The $80 billion the federal government spent was over 14% of the total value of the goods and services created that year. The 2022 GDP is about $25 trillion. The federal government spent over a quarter of that. In relative and rough terms, the US government is either roughly twice as powerful or eight times as powerful depending on how we look at it. Please bear with me because there's more to this story. We haven't even yet considered the tab as it goes because our government has become addicted to the narcotic of deficit spending. Meaning, it can't stop spending more than it takes in. This reduces the personal power of people in the future as it functions as attacks on the young and unborn.
Out-of-control deficits force the government to print more money to pay them, which devalues the currency. The resulting inflation is a hidden tax on everybody, but it hurts the people at the lowest end of the economic spectrum the most. In 1961, the total national debt was $289 billion. That was over half the GDP that year. Over the course of my life, that ratio fell to under a third of the GDP, but over the past decade, it surpassed the GDP. As of 2023, the national debt is understated because it doesn't account for all of its obligations. It's about $31 trillion. That's 123% of GDP. We're living on our kids' credit cards.
The whole truth is all those numbers don't tell the whole story. When I was in grade school, there was no Department of Education. When our family moved back to the United States from England, there was no Department of Housing and Urban Development. The EPA was born when I was nine. Countless other administrative agencies perform functions that regulate control or affect nearly every aspect of modern life. The point is, citizens have less power than they used to.
Personal power precept number six, limit mandates. Mandates are forced behaviors. They're enacted for good reasons. There's a demonstrable benefit to mandates, otherwise, there'd be no political gain in enacting them. As well-intentioned they may be, by definition, they reduce personal choice and power. The federal system is designed to leave most of those kinds of calls in the hands of states and various localities. When Washington gets involved, the winners are typically the special interests that sold the concept and paid for the policies with influence and campaign donations.
There's a demonstrable benefit to mandates; otherwise, there'd be no political gain in enacting them. As well-intentioned as they may be, by definition, they reduce personal choice and power.
The losers are typically individuals who have a smaller scope of choice in whatever dimension of life a mandate happens to affect. Some of the most prominent examples of this are the Affordable Healthcare Act and Social Security. As they exemplify, once in place, they're very difficult to alter or roll back. Another is the military draft. At times of crisis, it may be necessary, but it is incompatible with personal power, which brings us to the seventh personal power precept.
Personal power precept number seven, clarity and consistency in policy. Nations often behave reprehensively. The reasons for this are the same as the reasons to limit central control. They operate in the interests of the powerful and the few. Democratic nations have another complication. Policies swing based upon the general mood of the public, which can result in behavior that is inconsistent and unpredictable. These conditions are not conducive to healthy friendships and good relationships.
For illustration, let's look at how this affects foreign policy. The past century in the international landscape was largely defined by the clash between the American model of constitutional liberty for individuals versus multiple instances of experimentation with Marxist-derived collectivism manifested in the fascism of the axis powers and socialist dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Mao's communist China. The impact continues to shape the world now, but the dynamic continues to change.
The national model is being eroded with the onset of technology that connects the world in ways that make borders less meaningful. Multinational corporations and powerful NGOs control more and more resources and owe less and less allegiance to host nations. Among those in power, there's a belief that a world government will be positioned to solve major problems, such as war, anthropomorphic global warming, now called climate change for marketing purposes, and widespread suffering due to resource scarcity. The fact that being empowered above the national model would multiply their power and reduce their accountability to individuals is not something we ever hear as part of the pitch.
As with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages in these developments. Maybe a world government could successfully reduce war, at least the kind of war that is one sovereign nation and its allies against another and its allies. The disadvantage is that it will be even less responsive and respectful to the individual. We won't talk about the speculative aspect of whether this is a net win or inevitable with the onset of artificial intelligence and other technologies. What we as individuals must keep in mind is the more we export our power, the less we retain for ourselves. If someone believes the benefits of how one world government outweighs the risks, they should vote in favor of leaders with that proclivity, but they should do so with open eyes, thus far, that is not happening.
Personal power precept number eight, tough love in policymaking. With great power comes great responsibility. The concept was notably dramatized in Marvel's Spider-Man story. If you're not familiar, Peter Parker was a smart and awkward teenager who was bitten by a radioactive spider. The venom didn't kill him. It transformed him, giving him spider-like powers where he could climb walls and have strength, speed, agility, and durability proportional to spiders. His reaction upon gaining his abilities was what perhaps most teenagers would be under similar circumstances. He used them for his own personal gain.
Personal Power: With great power comes great responsibility. We must do what we can.
Peter first found a way to make money in the CD fight circuit. One night, he walked by a mugging in process. Peter was tired and late, and he turned a blind eye as he rushed home to get his homework done. His fate twists when that same criminal later kills his parents. That's some on-the-nose life lesson teaching right there, but the lesson for Peter was clear. Since he had the power to do something about a problem, in this case, crime, he had an obligation to do so. We don't have super-powers, not like the comic books or movies anyway, but we do have power. We have more power than we know.
With that power, what is our responsibility to right the wrongs of the world? We must do what we can. The question then becomes more complicated. What is it we can do and how do we do that best? Do we help a homeless person when we give them money? Yes, they can get food to eat and live another day. However, when the situation is they have no problem with food and they use our money to buy more of the same drugs that led them to become homeless in the first place, is giving them money helping them? The yes is not as clear.
What does real help look like in that example? We could, if the person was willing, bring them into our home, provide them life basics, and encourage them to enter treatment for whatever the ailments are that derailed their life. Is that our responsibility? If so, we live in a world of irresponsible people because virtually nobody ever does this. Instead, we rely on charitable and government organizations to provide as much support as they can. In many places, this works well. In others, it's woefully inadequate.
The same dynamic is true for any human need we can conceive. We can and should help, but there are limits. There are limits in resources. There are limits in time and priorities. There are even more substantial limits in the process of helping others than that. The immutable fact is every one of our lives is a function of our choices. Nobody can live our lives for us. When we choose the gratification of the moment over our long-term interest, that bill eventually comes due and we will pay that bill one way or another.
How do we help people break out of that negative spiral? One thing that doesn't work is to make the destructive behavior easier. When we mindlessly and soullessly throw money at people-problems, we end up causing more harm. We unintentionally create a culture of dependency. This is one of the biggest social plagues in our world nowadays. Parents who have faced a child who made harmful choices know this dynamic. Their choices in these situations are difficult. The most convenient choice is denial. They tell themselves it's not that bad or they'll grow out of it. In so doing, they drop their responsibility and leave their child's fate in their own young hands.
When we mindlessly and soullessly throw money at people-problems, we end up causing more harm. We unintentionally create a culture of dependency.
The hardest choice and the one that yields the best results more of the time is tough love. Tough love is grounded in the reality of the situation. We do what we can for our child in crisis, but we don't take their power away. It's very difficult in cases of addiction. By definition, the addict no longer has personal power over the source of their addiction. That powerlessness robs them of their spirit. Dependency is like that. The best way to help with addiction and dependency is to do what we can to prevent them from happening in the first place.
That is a long-winded winding way to illustrate the eighth personal power precept. We need to codify policies that reduce dependency in addiction. Well-meaning transfer payments are too often the opposite of that. We must think a little deeper and place resources closer to the problems. We do better to avoid one-size-fits-all approaches because that is not the world in which we live. The reason we have the situation we do is because our system rewards special interests and those constituencies, like all organisms, strive to survive through growth and expansion. They compete for limited resources, and in that competition, consideration about trade-offs or other priorities is a quick casualty.
The implication for all of this is that we are charged with the responsibility to do what we can do with our own resources. We don't help when we tell ourselves how good a person we are because we help force somebody else to take someone else's money to help someone else who we don't know. Personal power is not an easy and convenient path. It's demanding. We can't confer our responsibility to the government or anybody else. We either pick up the baton or we drop it. When we do, we drop some of our personal power.
In review, the eight personal power precepts are 1) Free yourself from ideological possession, 2) Vote with your dollars as well as your ballots, 3) Watch the fourth estate, 4) Respect all people as individuals. 5) Minimize central control, 6) Limit mandates, 7) Clarity and consistency in policy, and 8) Tough love in policy making. I'm not suggesting these are the only choices we have that will result in the best possible society. I don't know what those are and I don't think anybody else does either. These are aspirational notions born from observations about human nature that consistently manifest across time and place that guide us in the direction of greater personal power. This, in contrast to the barrage of campaign messages, is what we must keep in mind on this and every other election day. To maximize personal power, vote. Let's go.