A Primer for Voters, Lesson #3:

Mark Twain famously observed,  "We have the best Congress money can buy,"  But back then, a dollar was worth about 35 2024 dollars, but the price of buying a Congressman has gone up over a hundred times.   Alas, the worth of our Congressman did not keep pace with inflation.

It is a truism of political analysts that while most Americans say they do not trust the members of Congress, they tend to trust their own representative.   This is a bizarre dichotomy.  In the ordinary course of things, people generally are more likely to distrust the people they know than the people they have never met.  After all, we know the weaknesses and foibles of friends and neighbors, while we are free to judge comparative strangers on the basis of the way they present themselves to the world.  Of course, everyone likes to gossip about celebrities, but celebrities are not authentic human beings, only PR simulacra.

If we can learn anything from human experience or from study of history, we know that men and women are self-regarding.  "Look out for Number One," is an American proverb we do our best to live up to.  We praise altruism in principle, but limit our charity to writing checks to respectable fund-raisers.  Of course decent people take care of family members, but sociobiology has a good explanation for that apparent exception to the rule:  Our genes impel us to look after the creatures most closely related to us.  A child is roughly one half of each of his parents.  Three children is more me than I am.

Quite aside from serial killers, African dictators, and the egomaniacs who become film stars and pop musicians,  normal men and women look out for their own interests, and setting aside the few saints who sacrifice themselves for the good of others, we look upon people who do not look out for themselves as fools deserving of contempt.  Most people who enter a trade or a profession do so at least in part because they expect to do well out of it.

Of course, there are people who love playing baseball or rearing children, or searching out the secrets of nature, but even they--apart from mothers--expect to make their living by what they love doing.  In America, alas, the vast majority of employed people do not especially love their jobs as managers, store clerks, accountants, and dentists.  That is why so many professional men and women dream of early retirement.

What we call "work" is simply what we have to do to earn a living but would not do it for any other reason.  Once upon a time, it was the mark of a professional man that he would go on healing the sick or writing sonnets, even if he inherited wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.  A man who longs to retire is, by definition, wasting a good deal of his life, and the only justification he has is that he is supporting a family.   This is the kind of nobility celebrated by Sonny Throckmorton in his song, "The Way I Am""

Wish I enjoyed what makes my living
Did what I do with a willing hand
Some would run, but that ain't like me
So I just dream and keep on being the way I am,

Then, why would anyone imagine that people like Kamala Harris or Tiim Walz or Donald Trump or J.D. Vance entered politics for any but self-regarding reasons?  Some people do like the warmth of mass approval and the thrill of winning elections, as Donald Trump obviously does,  but, surely, no one at this late date in American history imagines that we are producing statesmen who want to serve their country?  In earlier times, good men did wish to earn the admiration of their peers and serve their community, but in an Empire of 300+ million consumers and sports fans, there is no common identity, no common cause to advance.

At their best, politicians are just like everyone else: self-regarding individualists looking out for themselves, but, while farmers, truck drivers, and construction workers have to engage in productive labor, politicians--like public school teachers--expect to get rich without producing anything but regulations that interfere in other people's business.  It is such an obvious point that I am almost ashamed to put it into words.  Politicians want you to vote for them, because it gives them money, power, and the right to abuse other people.   As one of our greatest poets put it, "A politician is an arse upon which everything has sat except a man."

And what is true of politicians is just as true of bureaucrats, Supreme Court Judges, federal prosecutors, and social workers.  The great Northcote Parkinson, in his excellent study of bureaucracy, demonstrated that the every bureaucrat's first order of business upon taking a position was to enhance his authority and diminish his work load.  The first objective is to hire an assistant, who will, applying the same reasoning, hire two more assistants.  Regulations are drawn up, laws propounded, judgments given will either serve the interest of the politicians or bureaucrats involved or at least not diminish their authority and prestige.  James Buchan won a Nobel Prize in Economics--deservedly--for developing a school of analysis known as Public Choice theory. It boils down to the simple proposition that bureaucrats and regulators make decisions in the interest of themselves and of the offices that give them wealth and power.

Are there exceptions?  Is there a Mother Teresa lurking somewhere in Congress, subverting the cynics and criminals who hold all the other seats?  Perhaps, but such miraculous exceptions are outside the normal run of human experience and should be discounted in advance.  So, when you vote for any politician, support any regulatory body, call for any reform, you are empowering one set of parasitical loafers and criminals against another.  Whomever and whatever  you choose to support, do so for any other reason but that you believe that such people will, for selfish reasons of their own, work in your personal interest.

Once with a group in Greece, a very  nice lady told me about her saintly Senator, what an exception he was to the general run of politicians, what a statesman, etc etc.   I asked her wealthy husband if he supported the Senator.  "Of course I do.  In my business, I have regulatory problems."  I told him without reserve that his was the most intelligent reason for political involvement.