Political Issues in an Age of Economic Nihilism

As the snow begins to melt, the birds chirp and sing; the trees and bushes bud with new growth. The sun reemerges from its long vacation behind the clouds, and the study of economics takes a holiday.

True, this last part probably doesn’t apply to everyone. Texans, Oklahomans and Montanans don’t forget everything they ever learned in school, just because it’s time for mayors and city councilmen to seek reelection to their valuable positions at the public trough, but here in the rust belt, where we hold mayoral elections in April, all memory of how economies work is overshadowed by financial nihilism.

We have an election of sorts in Chicago in April. This year, the choice is between Bigshot Rahm Emanuel, friend of Wall Street and White House, and Littleguy Chuy Garcia, friend of shop steward and demonstrator. Where do they differ on the issues?

Oh, it may look like they do… But when you dig deeper, it’s the same thing. They’re both socialists. They both favor a huge government that does everything for everyone. Both disregard the business sector, except as a source of gold to be mined, and they focus on what government can do for people.

Challenger Garcia and Incumbent Emanuel both favor A City That Works, to use the old Daley-era phrase… they want to offer food stamps and soup kitchens, public schools and public housing, gang outreach instead of gang incarceration, social workers to manage the problems that their Great Society caused in the first place.

Government, government everywhere. The only way they differ is in how to fund all this government.

Rahm Emanuel has unpopular red light cameras, little electronic revenue generators that make the city safer – not necessarily for drivers, passengers, or pedestrians, but safer for a budget process with holes in it. Tens of millions of dollars are collected every year from people who didn’t come to a full stop at a red light. The hard left calls this regressive, because people must pay whether they can afford it or not; hardliners would point out that if they can’t afford a ticket, they can just come to a full stop. It’s not rocket science.

Chuy Garcia proposes other new taxes, maybe a citywide income tax instead, maybe other “progressive” solutions in which those who work are punished more to support those do not, can not, or will not.

There is a budget hole, this is true. But all they propose is how to raise new revenue with new collection methods. If there are other solutions – and yes, there are – they go unmentioned.

If people will not pay taxes willingly by supporting tax rate increases… and if people object to paying taxes unexpectedly by receiving bills in the mail for blowing past red lights… what’s a money-grubbing government to do?

No, not gambling on a new government project like a new TIF district or tollway – though they sometimes do that too – we’re talking about gambling at the tables, or the machines, or the wheel.

The lottery has dependably brought in a chunk of money every year – when the odds are a billion to one, the house will always do well - but it’s not enough.

The casinos have dependably brought in cash too – it’s nothing like a lottery, in sheer quantity of gravy, but at least a casino directly employs people and entertains the public. We have some already, but… it’s never enough.

The horse tracks bring in money, but not as much as they used to. There are just too many ways to gamble now, and we’re not producing new racetrack enthusiasts at a fast enough pace. But if we just make it easier to bet on the horses, at off-track betting parlors perhaps, that could pull in a few more bucks.

So what do we see as we drive though our cities in 2015? We see “OTB” signs – video poker parlors – lottery pots of gold, all pointing out handy places to lose your money. The Big City Pols propose gambling expansions – more parlors, more machines in the bars and restaurants, more convenient ways to lose your money to the government’s house.

Governments today look to new and creative solutions. What haven’t we taxed before, what service, what possession, which people, which groups? Who can we suspend upside down by their feet and shake a bit more, until more money falls out of pockets that we haven’t yet rifled? Perhaps change in a back pocket we didn’t get at before, perhaps a spare wallet in the inside breast pocket that had a zipper? How can we get at that?

And most importantly – learning a lesson perhaps from the red light cameras – what demographic can we rob that isn’t politically strong enough to fight back?

So we increase our sin taxes – another quarter per pack on cigarettes, a dime for carrying out fast food, another fifty cents a beer. Who can object to taxing an unpopular product or act? Taxes are taxes, they’re all destructive, because they take money from the economy that could otherwise do good – but it’s harder to make a political case against them, so they skate through. “What, are you PRO-TOBACCO or something???”

Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island has offered a creative new one: a surtax on second homes valued above a million dollars each. There’s already a huge property tax on the homes, but surely we can pile on with a surtax on top of that, right? Who can object? Such rich people are just waiting to be robbed, like a nobleman dumb enough to ride through Sherwood Forest. He bought the second home, he’s asking to become a mark.

It’s known as the Taylor Swift Tax, because of the singer’s famous second mansion on the Rhode Island coast. She doesn’t vote there, so you can tax this demographic without even fearing loss of a vote; what’s not to love?

Next on the agenda: new taxes on foreign workers… cities taxing suburbanites… states taxing tourists from other states…

Why all this desperation? Because there’s a fixed amount of money out there, and we have to find a way to get more of it!

The key problem, of course, is one that is never stated, because the candidates all live and breathe the same worldview: it’s the zeitgeist of the zero-sum game.

Big City Politicians in modern America don’t understand economic growth; they’re hostile to the business community. They know that money is printed, but don’t understand how the wealth that money represents is actually created.

Big City Pols believe in the Marxist idea of a pie that must be split up and shared. All politics, all economics, all arguments are concerned with finding a way to increase one group’s share at the expense of another.

Tell a Big City Pol that there’s another way – that we can cut the size of government so we don’t need to tax as much – and they’ll look at you in horror or confusion. Why would you want to cut the size of government? In their world, government is all there is.

Or tell a Big City Pol that they could raise more revenue with a tax rate cut – that a lower percentage of a greater pool of economic activity is actually a bigger tax collection – and their eyes will swim in their sockets. They have never encountered Reaganomics, never been exposed to the concept of a supply-side economy. They have never read or heard of Milton and Rose Friedman, much less von Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt and Read.

Tell them that they wouldn’t need to spend as much on police if we actually convicted and sentenced our criminals when we catch them, instead of releasing them back into the community, and they just can’t process that. Catch-and-release is what they do; it’s all they’ve ever done.

Tell them that they wouldn’t need to spend as much on food stamps if people had jobs… tell them that we wouldn’t need so many buses and trains and trolleys if people could afford their own cars… tell them that we wouldn’t need so many social workers if we didn’t allow drugs, abortion, and chronic joblessness to destroy the city’s families… and they look at you like you’re from another planet.

Because the Big City Pols of today live in a worldview of despair. They don’t understand what used to be known as The American Way, a world in which a “Protestant Work Ethic” – the values of honest work by law-abiding, God-fearing citizens – produces prosperity and security for the vast majority of people… and even produces enough surplus to afford to take care of the small minority who truly needs and deserves some charity.

Listen to a debate, read the flyers, suffer through the speeches, and you’ll see a world completely at odds with the world our Founding Fathers designed for us. It’s a culture of dependence and pain, a culture of desperation and begging.

Our cities could be strong again, if they tried. Wipe out the crime, cut back the regulations that drive businesses out. Wipe out the crippling, burdensome taxes that discourage shopping; wipe out the drug abuse that encourages gangs and discourages commerce.

None of this is rocket science. “Capitalism and Freedom” - as laid out so brilliantly in Milton Friedman’s classic work of that very title – works every time it’s tried.

But until it is tried again, our cities will continue to suffer, and to sink into the abyss… no matter which smiling, sleazing, spending, grasping pol we choose on Election Day to serve as our alderman, our councilman, our trustee or our mayor.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based trade compliance manager and Customs broker. He was born in Chicago, but his parents wisely moved him to the suburbs before he was a year old, just in case…

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook and LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo, or on his own site at www.JohnFDiLeo.com.

Tens of millions of dollars are collected every year from people who didn’t come to a full stop at a red light. The hard left calls this regressive, because people must pay whether they can afford it or not; hardliners would point out that if they can’t afford a ticket, they can just come to a full stop. It’s not rocket science.

That’s an interesting comment. I think everyone hates them. I’m so far right I consider Fox news to be liberal. The city is taking advantage of the fact that people are not robots and there is no need to come to a “full stop” before making a free right turn at red light and virtually nobody does it. Just like where I live, anyone driving the speed limit is considered a slow poke, and extremely rare.

Tell a Big City Pol that there’s another way – that we can cut the size of government so we don’t need to tax as much – and they’ll look at you in horror or confusion.

Different political ideas and political systems are the result of different modes of thought. Freedom,natural rights, and capitalism are the products of an integrated mode of thought based on reason and reality, while socialistic totalitarianism is a product of a mode of thought that is misintegrated.

And egalitarianism,social justice,redistributionism,nihilism,environmentalism, pluralism,welfare statism,utilitarianism,pragmatism,eclecticism are products of a disintegrated mode of thought.

When one has a mode of thought that is misintegrated or disintegrated, one will naturally be horrified or confused by reason and reality.

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