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hairyfigment comments on Argument Screens Off Authority - Less Wrong
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No, you did not. A Machiavellan politician wants to stay in power, that is, to be elected. You're asserting a group interest that does not exist. We observe that politicians are happy to cut taxes (for people who can benefit them) if they personally get paid as much or more than before. Why would it be otherwise? (And any long-term interest, eg power for their family, should take the state of their civilization into account.)
Having the ability to take and redistribute someone else's money provides a concentrated benefit to the one doing the taking and redistributing. Cutting taxes produces a much more diffuse benefit. Concentrated benefits lead to Machiavellian behavior much more than diffuse benefits. It is possible, of course, to have an anti-taxes lobbying group which provides a concentrated benefit, but the overall balance between concentrated and diffuse benefits is on the side of the higher taxes.
That would be a diffuse cost. The politician may care about the portion of the diffuse effectthat affects his family, but that's only a small portion of the total. If the politician makes policy based on which costs help him and his family and which ones hurt him and his family, the concentrated ones will win. The ones that affect all civilization, a small portion of which he actually cares about because it goes to his family, will lose.
FFS, I shouldn't have to tell you the government is not a person and does not make decisions like one. Show me a correlation between tax rates and benefits to individual politicians, or admit it's diffuse as all Hell. Oh, wait:
Well then, since that's always present, we seem to have reached agreement that actually using it is unnecessary for a given politician. Nor, I would say, do we need additional reasons to justify implied taxation threats in a world where the USA is deep in debt.
Here's another comment for Eugine Nier to downvote: you are talking about a political issue and asserting by definition that politicians like Inhofe are not politicians. The real world doesn't enter into it. You are spouting the most shameful tribalist garbage.
"The politician" doesn't mean that I am making the statement about every single politician in the world.
No indeed, your No True Scotsman fallacy is over here. Though as I keep saying, the more fundamental problem is that you haven't shown anyone has the personal interest in question. And you try to hide this by talking as if the government were an agent, in violation of what should be conservative insights. I think I'm done with this.