Power corrupts, absolute power deranges absolutely
China's National People's Congress summons 5 percent economic growth into being
Lord Acton achieved notoriety by lecturing, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But power also deranges the holder with delusions of omnipotence capable of summoning wealth and prosperity into being by words alone.
Today’s Washington Post and New York Times report that China’s National People’s Congress, an echo chamber of President for life Xi Jinping, voted to make China’s economy grow next year by 5 percent. Some speculate that the CNP resisted the temptation to make the economy leap forward by 100,000 percent over the next 12 months because the opulence would leave its successors with nothing to do.
The Democratic Party in the United States seems at least first cousin to the NPC. It postulates that hiking the minimum wage does not and will not hike unemployment. It will make all employees richer. No limiting principle is articulated that would cap a minimum wage at a certain threshold. Thus, to end poverty instantly and to make all employees live happily ever after, simply jump the minimum wage to $10 million per minute. Even Karl Marx did not discern such miraculous relief for the proletariat without a revolution. The most wonderful discovery since Newton’s laws of motion.
Professional politicians fiercely resist Adam Smith’s enduring wisdom in The Theory of Moral Sentiments terrified of becoming superfluous and needing to find a real job that promotes consumer welfare:
“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”
Beware politicians promising the sky.