Zero-Sum Politics?
So, we've got ourselves a new ruler...er...president. I was sitting there this morning, half asleep, feeding the baby, and watching one of those CNN guys interview Colin Powell. The interviewer was musing about Obama's "bipartisan" overtures and the implications for the way national politics is viewed and conducted, and he made some comment about politics being thought of as a zero-sum game in recent years, to which Powell replied, "I win, you lose. That's all there is to it. But that's not what the Founding Fathers had in mind, and that's not what makes a democracy work."
The weird thing is that politics is, by definition, a zero-sum game. It's the antithesis of the economic process, which is not a zero-sum game. Politics, even in a democracy (or a democratic republic), is based on the use of force. It really can't be anything other than a zero-sum game, because if all parties to a transaction were benefiting, it would be because no one was being coerced--it would be an economic process rather than a political one. Politics comes in to play when one or more individuals or groups decide to appropriate more power/wealth than they could acquire through voluntary market interactions. They use force to do this, whether they call it monarchy, despotism, communism, or democracy. And whenever coercion is involved, there are necessarily winners and losers, with the winners gaining at the expense of the losers.
Consider: when some people get together and decide to improve their community by organizing a voluntary campaign to get homeless people healthy, cleaned up, educated, and off the streets, everyone wins. Even if those doing this work give up their time and money, they're doing it by choice, which means they're better off than if they hadn't done it (otherwise they wouldn't do it). However, when a group of people get together, declare that they have the legitimate authority to initiate force, and then proceed to go door to door confiscating money from people under threat of violence for the same purpose of helping the poor (while also keeping some of the loot for their troubles, of course), there are necessarily winners and losers. The winners are most definitely those who do the looting (we know them as politicians), and, if they're lucky, the homeless might get a portion, although without the strings of community pressure and encouragement attached (with the predictable result that many of them do little to move toward improving their situation). The losers, of course, are everyone who was looted at gunpoint. To make matters worse, the looters can claim that the lack of improvement in homelessness necessitates further action on their part, which means more looting and using part of that loot to hire more of their fellow community members out of their wealth-creating jobs in the free market and into the business of being looters, all for the supposedly noble purpose of the 'public good' or the 'general welfare.'
But then it occurs to me that I've misunderstood what Powell and the news guy were getting at. They weren't really saying that the political method of goal achievement--with looters gaining at the expense of the looted--was inappropriately regarded as zero-sum. No, I'm sure they must know that that's a perfectly apt description. What they meant was that the looters of Party A and the looters of Party B should stop fighting amongst themselves in zero-sum fashion, realize they're on the same team, and get their act together so they can unite to more effectively (and democratically?) loot the rest of us.
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