Today I’m working through a thing I keep hearing people say. “Everything is political.”
It’s a very odd saying, in my mind, for a variety of logical and philosophical reasons.
First of all, it’s a declaration of totalitarianism. It seems very strange to me for people to just agree with totalitarians. It’s a slave mentality.
Absolute power and an absolute obligation for people to obey that power is not a path to good incentives, or good rulers.
It also encourages the kind of thinking… “It’s just politics,” used as a rationalization for all kinds of evils applied to innocents.
Even if we soften it to “Everything affects politics” or “politics affects everything,” we find ourselves walking down the same totalitarian path, just with nicer words around it.
It’s a misunderstanding of something being a thing and something having an effect on a thing. It’s reminiscent of Wickard v. Filburn, which held that products that you make yourself and consume yourself affect interstate commerce, and therefore are interstate commerce. That’s not necessarily true, and even if it were, it gives politicians more (if not unlimited) political power, which is exactly what we don’t want.
There’s a difference between these three things:
- I exercise political power over X
- I do not exercise political power X, but I could
- I may not/shall not exercise political power over X
There might be a bit of gray area in between, but it seems like these are real distinctions.
This fallacy also creeps into public goods theory (which Hoppe dismantled).
Anyway, just some thoughts I wanted to get out there.