April 17, 2005
Political Musings
I was reading an opinion piece on the Fair Tax, at of all places, Gun Muse, when I came across this final paragraph that sums up something I intuitively have felt, but never heard expressed in such a clear manner.
"...This is a political issue and the politics is money. Just keep this in mind at all times as you listen to the argument. If a politician is elected by the most votes and the Republicans are the “Party of the Rich” Then doesn’t that mean they need more rich people.(?) Democrats are the "party of the poor", so that means they need (more)what to get elected?"
To express it mathmatically, if party A (A= Republicans) and party B (B= Democrats) each need a majority of C (C= Citizens, and where C is broken into subsets C-1 {rich} and C2 {poor}), and each party needs a majority to gain power. If you posit that party A is the party of C-1 and party B is the party of C-2, it follows that both parties would need to cause the greater number of C to join the either of the subsets of C-1 or C-2 Hence, Party A = >C-1, and party B=>C-2. An election could be expressed as: S/A=(>c-1 +
(actually in the real world it is the party that garners the majority of BOTH c-1 and c-2, or, S/A= (>c-1 + >c-2) Or S/b=(>c-1+c-2)
It logically follows that both parties would espouse policies leading to a greater number of C joining the subset they "stand for", so that they could garner the greatest number of votes and thus remain in power.
So WHICH subset do YOU wish to belong to, the "rich" or the "poor"?; keeping in mind that the policies of either party will result in the likelyhood of you belonging to one or the other subset?
It's not really a valid equation(because of the reality that you need the greatest number of both sub-sets), but it is an interesting thought problem of logic. And if you assume that either party will enact policies to boost the number of "their" supporting sub-set, you can, by the rules of logic assume that Democrats want to create more poor people and that Republicans want to create more rich people. I see that logic functioning in many of the programs proposed by either of the parties, if you don't factor in the law of unintended consequences.
The Republican Party doesn't need rich people to vote for them. (The super wealthy represent a tiny sliver of the population. You and I never meet these people.) What they need is people, won over by all sorts of nonsense about leadership and social issues, to vote for the party (in spite of the fact that it's against the average Joe's economic interests). The Republic Party minus ridiculous issues such as flag burning and the Ten Commandments is nothing more than a tiny group of fat cats trying to monopolize the government's purse strings. My advice to the Left is that it should give the red-staters every thing they want: guns, commandments inscribed on every school wall, leaders that drawl and wear cowboy boots, the whole shebang. But it should hold fast on the economic issues. Republican support would then wither so fast that they'd have a hard time beating the Liberarians or the Greens.
Posted by: karlo at April 18, 2005 09:13 PM