A second point from my big government and quantitative easing post, yesterday, that merits elaboration is the progressive notion that we can somehow even the balance with the rich and powerful — The 1% — by collecting a whole bunch of power together in one place and giving the government the authority to wield it. From that flawed premise grows quite an impressive panoply of intellectual back-filling and patchwork fixes to civic structure.

The idea behind siphoning power to the government is that when it’s just floating freely out in the society, the average folk are not equipped to keep it from following a sort of magnetic property of power that draws it all to just a few people. The 1% simply uses its leverage to crush and to manipulate the public, so what’s needed is for well-intended people to have the ability to redistribute money and power, as well as to restrict people’s behavior and socially engineer the population in order to rout out all of those structural biases that the powerful have woven through our society throughout human history.

The problem with this (admittedly simplified) view of social progress is that it relies on two myths, the first being the myth of government altruism. The idea that government offices somehow either (1) attract uniquely reasonable and well-intentioned people or (2) transform ordinary people into altruists is pure and simple fantasy. Instead, the roles that offer power will tend to attract people who want power and to corrupt those who enter them for some other reason.

So, we wind up tangled in a web of ethics and campaign finance laws to try to straighten the crooked timber of human nature. The reform that will finally forestall the corruption of public officials is always one more tweak of the law away — current evidence notwithstanding.

This leads directly into the second myth, that of government exceptionalism, as if representative government somehow creates a realm in which normal rules of social interaction — which the powerful are able to manipulate outside of government — do not apply. Stepping back to look at government for what it is will show how foolish this is.

American government is a complicated network of legalities and tax rules punctured here and there with an outpost of representative democracy. This characterization isn’t to denigrate representative democracy, which remains the most freedom-enhancing system yet devised by mankind. Rather, it’s to illustrate the limits of the structure, advising its use only for those things that absolutely must be handled by government.

With respect to the topic at hand, the question is why progressives believe those outposts of representative democracy are a better check on abuse than are individual autonomy, the development of social traditions, and the ability to simply stop buying a product or otherwise take influence away from the powerful through means available to each and every one of us.

Progressives prove the power of these alternate checks when they use campaign finance laws to gain access to lists of their opposition’s donors and target their places of business. Take government out of the social equation — and remember that we now have telephones and Internet communications — and there’s no reason activists couldn’t target businesses in exactly the same way, for things that our shared culture sees as misdeeds.

The reality is that democracy is every bit as, if not more, susceptible to the advantages of the powerful. Think of how many areas of concern the government influences and the limited options that we have to elect people to address them. We don’t elect the secretary of human services or the tax administrator or the director of infrastructure or the director of economic development or a minister of social policy. We elect a handful of generalist politicians with authority over all of these systems.

It’s all too easy to sell regulations as controls on abuse when what they really do is to prevent people from climbing the ladder of success and directly taking wealth and power from those who currently hold them. And where that can’t be done, the population can be made to choose candidates who will advance the economic interests of the powerful, but do so while directly buying individuals’ votes with handouts and luring the ideological with promises of using government’s power to force society to match their preferences (mainly through social issues).

As long as a candidate can find something that an individual voter values more than the opaque ways in which government expands the influence of special interests, the candidate can avoid correction for siphoning power.

Of course, this isn’t really a tradeoff, because the handouts reduce the incentive for people to work to compete with the powerful and the re-imagined culture undermines conventions, like marriage, that had helped to stabilize the lives of people in difficult situations and subtly influence their behavior in a healthier direction.

At the end of it all, those who back an expansive, expensive government have really just been duped into believing that, by dismantling the system that had empowered us all, they’ll be the powerful ones.