Published in the Western Standard, June 13, 2005, p. 17. (Also available in a pdf scan.)

Worse than Prostitution
by
Pierre Lemieux

To say that Belinda Stronach is a whore would be slightly misleading, for all politicians are. Indeed, the whole political system relies on whore politicians. One major observation has changed the analysis of politics over the past half century: politicians’ motivations are not different from the motivations of the rest of us, that is, politicians act out of self-interest. They do whatever they think is required to get elected or stay in power, for this is how they earn a living. Moreover, as others are workaholic, politicians enjoy power. “Parties formulate policies in order to win elections,” wrote Anthony Downs in his 1957 classic, An Economic Theory of Democracy, “rather than win elections in order to formulate policies.” Politicians sell policies and benefits to the electors in return for the latter’s votes (and the taxpayer’s money). Whatever the majority seems to want, the politicians will try to deliver. This is exactly what they are supposed to do in our democratic system. There are other views of democracy—like direct democracy or, on the contrary, more elitist representative democracy—but they don’t describe the political world as it is hic et nunc. Politicians are whores and Belinda Stronach, a prima donna whore. From an economic and libertarian viewpoint, there is nothing wrong with whores. They merely propose short-term, non-barter, very specialized contracts. And when a whore sells you a certain service, what she sells belongs to her, and I am not myself obliged to buy. But when the state sells something to somebody—say, an anti-smoker apartheid measure, or a gun-owner registry, to organized public health interests—everybody is obliged to buy. Similarly, when Belinda Stronach starts selling the goodies of the state in exchange for votes, everybody will have to buy, as long as an apparent majority buys. This system is tolerable when the state only sells limited services for the protection of everybody’s liberties, but it becomes a “totalitarian democracy” (to use Bertrand de Jouvenel’s expression) when it stands ready to sell anything that any majority wants. Belinda Stronach is a perfect illustration. “Canadians must know what I stand for and what I bring to the table,” she wrote in the National Post when she was running for the Conservative leadership last winter. In fact, what she was bringing to the taxpayers’ table was her absence of ideas and her knife and fork. She will say, and has said, anything that can get her closer to power. Again, this is not surprising, but it is highly frustrating for those of us who are fighting a war against the state for the restoration of our traditional liberties. Belinda Stronach not only entered politics to force on minorities her politically correct lack of ideas, she not only did it under false representation by joining the Conservative party, but she then jumped ship and threw a lifeline to Paul Martin and his “secret band of robbers and murderers.” This colourful expression to describe the state is borrowed from 19th-century individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner, but I admit that our nice state seldom needs to murder, because its wards cave in before the cops show at the door. Stronach belongs to the club of billionaires* who want to use the power of the state to dictate how the rest of us should live our lives. Worse still, she belongs to a subset of the club, the ones who are rich, not by demonstrating their efficiency in serving consumers on the free market, but because daddy made the money. Ralph Maddocks, an old British friend of mine who lives in Cowansville, Que., makes anagrams as a hobby. For “Belinda Stronach” he found: “Rich blonde Satan” and “Aha! Blond cretins.” Okay, I am being much too ad hominem here, especially towards a woman. My sincere apologies. At the time of writing, we don’t know if the Honourable Minister Belinda Stronach will succeed in preventing an election, but one thing is sure: it is certainly a good riddance for the Conservative party. * Note that "billionnaires" has been replaced by "multibillionnaires" by mistake in the printed version.