Trusting Politicians with Our Money is like Leaving a Cat in Charge of a Cream Jug (A debate on Illogical Endowment, Rational Depletion of Entrusted Capital in a Monopoly Industry, and Total Decentralization of Governmental Services.)

Abstract

There is a prevalent belief of there being two classes of politicians: the good and the bad ones; that is to say that some politicians hold the public's interest at heart and will make good use of public funds (i.e. taxed capital), while other politicians, due to a plurality of possible reasons, will make inefficient or even fraudulent use of public money. This belief is often attached to the notion that if the politicians are chosen by a system of representative democracy, and if they only hold office for a set amount of years, society can dish out the bad ones in a process of trial and error.The purpose of my paper is to dispel these dangerous and utopian ideas with pure and a priori logic in the praxeological tradition of the Austrian School of Economics. I aim to show the logical inconsistency that is inherent to the irrational, yet commonly held trust towards individuals that claim to be able to use our money better than ourselves, and who enforce this assertion with the threat of private property violations. The conclusions of this piece are that not only is it impossible for capital that is acquired without a person's explicit consent to be used in said person's best interest, but also that in the larger scheme of things, every ethical individual in society is to benefit from living in an environment where the services currently provided by governmental agencies are instead handled by private entities which do not act as monopolistic expropriators.