Eating the Seed Corn

I have been trying to find the best way to explain to people that leftist economics are destructive.

I know that I am fighting an uphill battle since so many people "just want to take a bit" and seem to honestly not understand  how that could hurt them in the long run.

The moral argument of pointing out that stealing is always wrong seems to fall flat because they just realize that they are being bad people, and feel like you are accusing them, and so they respond with anger.

But some of them do seem like there is a glimmer of intellectual curiosity remaining, and I feel like if I could explain it right, that I might be able to pull a few converts out of the whirlpool of hatred and envy.

The best one that I have come up with is the "eating the seed corn" analogy.

Most people don't and can't understand how ripping off insurance companies or "taxing the rich" ends up leaving them in poverty, but they can understand simple analogies.

This analogy works best in the most desperate cases.  I know people who have grave medical situations, and honestly believe that if it wasn't for Obamacare, that they would be dead.  They see any argument against Obamacare as a direct threat to their lives,   They insist that Obamacare is best for everyone, and refuse to believe that it could be bad (despite all the millions of people who have suffered from it already).

The analogy goes like this -

Say you have some farmers, and a few hungry families.  Now the families might be legitimately down on their luck and facing a serious shortage of food.  Now of course they are going to want some of the farmer's crops, but the farmers aren't going to want to give them any unless they can pay for it.  In fact the farmers might have already pledged their crops to be sold (locked in a price on any standard commodity market).

Now along comes "The Hero" - your friendly local politician.

This guy wants votes.  He knows he needs them to get power for himself.

He absolutely knows that he can count on the votes of the hungry families.  He also knows that he can "tax" (steal) a bit from the farmers and the commodities markets and still be able to get some votes from them.

But he is not sure if this is going to be enough votes.  He really wants power, and needs to find the most sure way to get it.

If he can isolate one group and take advantage of them, that limits his downside, and significantly drives up his likelihood of getting elected.

The hungry families don't have anything he can take, but they do have something that he can use - a sad and tragic situation.

The commodities market folks might be a target at a later time, but right now the politician doesn't see them as the low hanging fruit.

The low hanging fruit are clearly the farmers.

The politician knows that the farmers still have a bunch of corn that is not going to market.  Now the reality is that this corn is needed to plant a new crop the next year, but no one really knows that or understands that except the farmers.

So the politician runs on a platform of taking "just a little" of this seed corn and giving it to the hungry families.

He immediately ties up the Hungry Family constituency and they campaign for him far and wide telling sad stories, and tales of woe.   Now most of these are legitimate, and it is right to feel sorry for these people and try to find ways to help them, but most people don't connect that it is also bad to steal from the farmers.

The farmers try to explain that the seed corn is essential, and that their livelihood is based on it.  But no one really cares.  They look at the hungry families with their compelling stories of woe, and then at the (comparatively) rich farmers trying to justify keeping some of their wealth and they automatically feel like the farmers are just being scumbags.

Even the commodities market guys tell the farmers - "geeze can't you help those people out at all?"

So what ends up happening?

Clearly the politician gets elected.  He wins in a landslide.

But all is not ruin.  At least not yet.

The first few years, the politician takes some of the seed corn and gives it to the hungry families.   Everyone voted for the politician, and sees this as a great success.

The hungry families get some food, and they feel like they have achieved a moral victory despite the fact that they have really just loaned out their plight to a thief in exchange for a cut of the spoils.

But this goes on for a few years.  Everyone thinks that they have won except for the farmers who are now struggling to keep up production and losing a bit every year.

After a few years, the politician and the hungry families are so comfortable in their "victory" that they forget that there ever was any argument against what they are doing.

But reality starts creeping in.

The hungry families have done very little to improve their situation because they have found the fruits of "voting themselves into prosperity".

The commodity market guys believe that the whole situation is done and over with, and if anything the fact that the politician and the hungry families "won" convinces most of them that they were right all along.

But the farmers are having a hard time.  They are losing crop yields every year.  As they lose yields, their profits go down, and it becomes increasingly hard to keep their farms going.

On top of that, they are dealing with the frustration of publicly being cast as "wealthy villains" who were "justifiably stole from".

Slowly but surely, the consequences start to set in.  Some of the farms start going under.

No one cares about them, because now society just sees them as greedy rich targets for biannual electoral theft.

The remaining farms consolidate, and try to keep things going, but as overall crop yields go down, there is less and less for the voting public to steal.

This infuriates the hungry families.  They have come to see the seed corn as an "entitlement" that is owed to them.

Years of dehumanizing the farmers has made it possible for the hungry families to truly hate them and so they insist that the politician does something about this.

It should be pointed out that the politician absolutely LOVES this situation.

It gives him "The Hero" the opportunity to come in and save the day (ensuring more votes and a re-election).

The politician castigates the farmers as wealthy and stingy.  This appears to everyone to be the case, because even though the total amount of farms has gone down since so many have gone out of business, the ones that have remained have consolidated to try to save on costs, and now appear to be bigger then ever.

The politician points to the "big profits" that are being made at the commodities markets, and says "this is how the farmers are getting rich at our expense and not paying their fair share".

He insists on levying taxes against the commodities market.  Now by this time the commodity market guys have been on the politicians side for so long that they might be upset about this, but they are unlikely to hold it against the politician.  In fact the politician is probably convincing them that this is a necessary measure that needs to be taken against the farmers.

And as a good politician, he is going to grease all the wheels, and work with both the commodities guys and the remaining farmers to create regulations to prevent competition and give them stability in their respective fields.

But as more and more farms go out of business, these people end up joining the hungry families and this drives up desire for more seed corn.

The politician continues to play each side against the middle, and embraces every new emergency that comes along as a new opportunity to further turn people against one another.

In the end, you have a stratified society turned inwards in anger.  Divided, and near or even past the point of violence towards each other after long periods of resentment and legislative theft.

All of this is the result of turning to politicians to try to solve problems of production and commerce.