I was reading an opinion piece on the Fair Tax, at of all places, Gun Muse, when I came across this final paragraph that sums up something I intuitively have felt, but never heard expressed in such a clear manner.

"...This is a political issue and the politics is money. Just keep this in mind at all times as you listen to the argument. If a politician is elected by the most votes and the Republicans are the “Party of the Rich” Then doesn’t that mean they need more rich people.(?) Democrats are the "party of the poor", so that means they need (more)what to get elected?"

To express it mathmatically, if party A (A= Republicans) and party B (B= Democrats) each need a majority of C (C= Citizens, and where C is broken into subsets C-1 {rich} and C2 {poor}), and each party needs a majority to gain power. If you posit that party A is the party of C-1 and party B is the party of C-2, it follows that both parties would need to cause the greater number of C to join the either of the subsets of C-1 or C-2 Hence, Party A = >C-1, and party B=>C-2. An election could be expressed as: S/A=(>c-1 + c-2)=C (S= success for the party) where the winning party garner the majority of the subset they (supposedly) stand for.

(actually in the real world it is the party that garners the majority of BOTH c-1 and c-2, or, S/A= (>c-1 + >c-2) Or S/b=(>c-1+c-2)

It logically follows that both parties would espouse policies leading to a greater number of C joining the subset they "stand for", so that they could garner the greatest number of votes and thus remain in power.

So WHICH subset do YOU wish to belong to, the "rich" or the "poor"?; keeping in mind that the policies of either party will result in the likelyhood of you belonging to one or the other subset?

It's not really a valid equation(because of the reality that you need the greatest number of both sub-sets), but it is an interesting thought problem of logic. And if you assume that either party will enact policies to boost the number of "their" supporting sub-set, you can, by the rules of logic assume that Democrats want to create more poor people and that Republicans want to create more rich people. I see that logic functioning in many of the programs proposed by either of the parties, if you don't factor in the law of unintended consequences.

Posted by: Delftsman3 at 12:10 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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