The problem with the benevolent tyrant

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 31/03/2025

Guest columnist.
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In 1979, Gordon Tullock, professor of economics and a scholar at the Public Choice School, presented the world with his book, The Reasons for Voting. The work, despite its small page count, beautifully debunks the fallacies and fallacies that underpin political marketing campaigns and the education system. Let's see:

The noble bureaucrat and the evil businessman: Businessmen are often presented as selfish individuals who seek only their own personal interests, while bureaucrats are often presented as noble individuals with the most sublime feelings for their fellow man. However, both are selfish; the difference lies in the means by which these personal interests are satisfied. Businessmans must necessarily make consumers happy in order to achieve their financial goals; hence, the need to identify their customers' tastes and preferences. The bureaucrat, on the other hand, satisfies their selfish interests by using the power of the political apparatus, for example, bribes and kickbacks for construction permits. The businessman profits, while the bureaucrat profits from public spending. Believe me, there's a huge difference.

Elections as mechanisms for alternating power: Linked to the previous point, education has taught people to view bureaucrats in an idyllic and romantic way, but not as what they really are: selfish and imperfect beings, just like any of us. The direct consequence is that, instead of limiting the power of the state, we use elections to seek perfect and noble bureaucrats. Obviously, we fall into the trap of whoever offers the most "free" things, or whoever gives me the most "rights." Therefore, we should not be surprised that politicians can change electoral banners and marketing fetishes for each electoral process, even for different audiences in the same week.

Market failures: Economic theories that purport to expose supposed market failures, such as monopolies, are, in reality, pretexts for expanding the power and scope of bureaucrats. At its core, it's an act of superstition that turns bureaucrats into omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent beings. Furthermore, many of these supposed failures have their origins in special laws and privileges granted by those in power, not in the market.

However, there is one question that no one asks: how are all these privileges financed?

Easy, with private money.

A program of fiscal greed is underway, as taxes and regulations rise to intolerable levels, even threatening private property, for example, through "nationalizations" and confiscations in the name of the "national interest."

Then, especially when they realize that raising taxes isn't very popular, it's time to start using the inflation-generating machine. In fact, the 20th century went down in history as the century of inflation, as bureaucracies, short-sightedly, used the money-printing press to appease their loyalists, sometimes with direct transfers to unions and business owners, or other times with depreciations of the local currency against international currencies. In this regard, Juan Ramón Rallo, economist and specialist in monetary issues, explains in his article "Devaluation or Internal Adjustment: It's Not the Same," that:

Depreciation may in some cases be an anti-political shortcut, but a shortcut that rewards the rent-seeking scoundrel and punishes the ingenious consumer servant. Never doing things right is equivalent to doing them sloppily; and depreciation and other narrow-minded politicians' schemes are botched jobs that cost us dearly.

The consequences?

Broken societies, economies in crisis, and populations suffering all kinds of hardships. In short, the pursuit of the benevolent tyrant has a very costly externality: the sacrifice of freedom on the altar of state power.

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