Well, the distinction is essentially meaningless in a 'free market' society. There are some politicians who are in it to help others but many succumb to the economic motivations present in our current political system. Powerful lawmakers can parley their political power into economic gain and given the number of rich people in Congress and the amount of lobbying money spent it appears the reverse is true as well.
Well, the distinction is essentially meaningless in a 'free market' society.
Political power and economic "power" aren't the same sort of thing: one is ultimately based on force, and the other on willing trade. A market is only free to the extent that political power allows, and the only entirely free market would be in the absence of political power.
There is never an absence of political power. Presently it is the state of humans that whenever a sufficiently large number of them congregate a power dynamic takes hold. Those who control the resources have the power. Calling this economic power or political power is meaningless. It is power and it is wielded.
The goal ought to be to diffuse this power amongst as many people as possible. Concentrated power is the thing to fear.
Libertarians of various stripes derive a lot of their concept of ethics from the non-agression principle. Of course, then left and right libertarians argue over even the details of something this simple, for example, left libertarians consider private property to be forceful in nature. [2]
In a free market society, there would be no such thing as a powerful lawmaker. By saying that many politicians are incapable of resisting corruption, you are making an argument for severely limiting the power of the government.
No, I am making no such argument. What needs to change, in my opinion, is our culture. Many politicians in our current political system with our current culture are incapable of resisting corruption. Severely limiting the power of government would just let corporations run roughshod over us even more than they do now.
>Severely limiting the power of government would just let corporations run roughshod over us even more than they do now.
I disagree, and offer this article as a source of several examples. The corporations currently have far more influence over the actions of the government than the general public, which means that corporations are able to exercise a lot of effective power over the general public. By removing some government power, you lessen the effective power of corporations. If the government is stripped of its power to do things like shutting down small coffin makers or imposing high tariffs on specific markets, corporations lose their ability to influence the government into doing those things.
I defy you to show me any examples other than Microsoft of a corporation gaining so much economic power that, without employing the government, it was able to exercise more power than the government currently enables it to.
This is all true, but you are merely describing different symptoms of a common illness.
The illness is that some people choose to initiate force against others. Every single human being should refrain from such behavior. All interactions among individuals should be by mutual consent, or not at all.
Unfortunately that simple moral principle has deep implications which most people are not willing to accept. And so the nightmare continues.
But their goal is still economic. They aren't getting unlicensed coffin sellers banned because they think that's what the people need, they're doing it to protect their profit margin.
Right, and the only way to ban those coffin sellers is by force. Someone has to be willing to go in there with a gun and make them stop. The ability to get that done is called "political power".
Of course, normally it doesn't come to that, but the threat has to be real otherwise those naughty people will just go right on selling coffins. (My goodness, they might even be unsafe.)
Yes, people often seek political power in order to maximize their economic power. And people with economic power can often gain political power. Nevertheless, the two types of power are distinct. Political power is the ability and willingness to initiate force against others. Economic power is the ability to deploy capital in production. Just because one can be used to pursue the other does not make them equivalent.
