THE logic of the market is predicated on the pervasive and glorious inequality of man.

No two people have the same scales of values, talents, or ambitions.

It is this radical inequality, and the freedom to choose our own lot in life that makes possible the division of labour and exchange.

Through money and contracts, markets allow us to settle differences to our mutual advantage.

The result (and here is why people call the market miraculous) is a vast, productive system of co-operation that meets an incomprehensibly huge range of human needs, and finds a special role for everyone to participate in building prosperity.

Now, to politics.

The system of voting is designed to replicate the market’s participatory features.

In fact, it is a perverse distortion of the market system.

In markets, you get the goods you pay for.

If you don’t and there’s been a violation of contract, you have legal recourse.

In voting, people are not actually purchasing anything but a politician’s word, which is not only legally worthless; he has every incentive to lie to produce the desired result.

Legal recourse

Politicians should be held accountable and a system should be developed for the citizen to take legal recourse when a politician fails to live up to his or her promise.

It is not only enough to remove them at the end of a term, but we should be able to force them to adhere to the promises made on the campaign trail.

Then perhaps, we may get some results.

The politician should be held politically and financially responsible for his word, his promise which forms part of a binding contract with the people he/she represents.

Politics today takes no account of individuals.

You and I are merely a tiny speck on the plains of existence, of what is generally called “the people” and what “the people” thinks is only relevant insofar as it accords with a political agenda advantageous to the government and its friends.

When you think you’re voting for something better, for the efficient management of state and the allocation of resources that will eventually benefit the collective; when you think you’re voting for less government involvement in our lives, think again!

Instead, you get ever more government intrusion (more centralisation -- look at the concentration of government offices in Port of Spain; look at government’s involvement in Housing, in the Social Services).

Simply put, this is so because it is not the voters who are managing the system.

It is the well organised financiers and groups who feed at the trough managed and owned by the government.

Thus, there is a vast gulf which separates the average voter from the politician’s real day-to-day interests.

So many fools

The spectacle of elections grows more absurd every year.

We are asked to cast ballots for people we don’t even know, for people who were only chosen because of their financial contributions and loyalty to the political leader.

Candidates in elections often have very little clue about the affairs of state.

Examples for this abound; take for instance Adesh Nanan, Hamza Rafeeq, Eudine Job-Davis or Eddie Hart.

Nothing may be wrong with these people personally, but were they cut out to be politicians or managers of the state?

In markets, entrepreneurial talent means the ability to anticipate and serve the needs of the buying public.

In politics, success means the ability to manipulate public opinion so that enough fools (so regarded by politicians) reaffirm the politician’s power and glory.

It takes special talents to do this, which are not cultivated in good families.

Hence, the issue of politics having a morality of its own was raised in recent times.

Essentially, the person’s perspective in this debate will be predicated on his view of politics.

Brute force

If Trinidad and Tobago politics was characterised solely by voting and the products of voting, the system would be loathsome enough.

And yet, the corruption runs deeper.

The real power behind the leviathan is wielded by a vast, unelected army of bureaucrats who fancy themselves specialist in the pseudoscience of public policy.

In their minds, the only role for the citizenry, treated as a homogeneous entity, is to conform or suffer the consequences.

To a large extent, they are the ones who maintain the status quo and the discrimination, victimisation and lack of meritocracy that comes along with it.

Gone is the co-operation, peace and genuine diversity of markets.

Instead, we experience brute force.

Intellectuals specialise in dreaming up grandiose tasks for government which would be doomed to fail even if perfectly implemented and yet, the most obvious criticism of all government schemes is that they must all be mediated by this corrupt system called politics.

Albert Jay Nock was right to characterise the State, democratic or not, as a parasite on society.

Like a plague bacillus, its only successes are from its own point of view.