Politics of scarcity

I think it is now impossible for me to hold back enlightenment from prols any longer. Any how, for those who came late, long time back DataNazi  wrote a couple of posts about electoral dynamics in India. To summarize he modeled the dynamics in terms of economics, to be more specific as rival goods vs non rival goods .
I though a little bit about and came to the conclusion that the dynamics can be better understood in terms of externalities. This is a follow up post.

Now for our understanding it will be helpful to explicate some attributes of politics. First is the aim, proper aim of politics is promoting common good. This is a worthy goal. Problem arises owing to means, which is exercising monopoly of violence vested with state. Hence politics in practice is various groups chasing power of state. Now this is problematic because power as wielded by state is ultimately a very scarce resource, hence we have politics degenerating into a power struggle.

Here it should be pointed out that power is actually wielded out by leaders and not groups collectively. Hence for leaders to retain power they must convince the group that their wielding the power is in group interest.

To achieve leaders take recourse to what I like to call appeal to scarcity, by representing wealth as a zero-sum game and promising wealth distribution favorable to group. The reason it works is that this appeal triggers our deep rooted instinct which have evolved owing to a fundamental ecological principle i.e. competition for scarce resources in order to survive.

Thus demagogues having secured power by promising what is in effect "robbing Peter to pay Paul", public policy is reduced to devising ways and means to effectively "loot" one group to other.
Of course in general civilized man is repelled by the notion of "looting", hence to justify the "looting", the group which is being robbed is condemned as "exploiters" and the robbers themselves become "victims". Hence arises curious morality which Ayn Rand famously termed as sanction of the victim.

This, by the way, is not a bug but feature as far as democracy goes. Anyway it has pernicious but entirely predictable result, one is the fragmentation of society into more and more competing groups of victims for enriching themselves by impoverishing others, soon the inter group dynamics fairly confused so that intermediaries must decide the share of spoils going the groups, this mechanism for redistribution promotes rent seeking by political class, thus putting the parasites in charge of society .

Second is that this kind of polity actively discourages wealth creation as any wealth created is bound to be transferred,this ultimately destroys the entrepreneurial spirit, further such culture is solely preoccupied with the all consuming matter of distributing the spoil and as such has no place for any discussion for common good.
Thus the society is condemned to impoverishment and misery.

This is what I was referring as the vicious cycle (or as Data Nazi aptly put it, spiral).