Office-seeking is about one thing: power. (Money is sometimes a motivator, but power is the common denominator of politics.) Selection bias, as I argue here, deters office-seeking and voting by those (relatively rare) individuals who oppose the accrual of governmental power. The inevitable result — as we have seen for decades and are seeing today — is the accrual of governmental power on a fascistic scale.
most often refers to the distortion of a statistical analysis, due to the method of collecting samples. If the selection bias is not taken into account then any conclusions drawn may be wrong.
Selection bias can occur in studies that are based on the behavior of participants. For example, one form of selection bias is
self-selection bias, which is possible whenever the group of people being studied has any form of control over whether to participate. Participants’ decision to participate may be correlated with traits that affect the study, making the participants a non-representative sample. For example, people who have strong opinions or substantial knowledge may be more willing to spend time answering a survey than those who do not.
I submit that the path of politics in America (and elsewhere) reflects a kind of self-selection bias: On the one hand, most politicians run for office in order to exert power. On the other hand, most voters — believing that government can “solve problems” or one kind or another — prefer politicians who promise to use their power to “solve problems.” In other words, power-seekers and their enablers select themselves into the control of government and the receipt of its (illusory) benefits.
Who is self-selected “out”? First, there are libertarian* office-seekers — a rare breed — who must first attain power in order to curb it. Self-selection, in this case, means that individuals who eschew power are unlikely to seek it in the first place, understanding the likely futility of their attempts to curb the power of the offices to which they might be elected. Thus the relative rarity of libertarian candidates.
Second, there are libertarian voters, who — when faced with an overwhelming array of power-seeking Democrats and Republicans — tend not to vote. Their non-voting enables non-libertarian voters to elect non-libertarian candidates, who then accrue more power, thus further discouraging libertarian candidacies and driving more libertarian voters away from the polls.
As the futility of libertarianism becomes increasingly evident, more voters — fearing that they won’t get their “share” of (illusory) benefits — choose to join the scramble for said benefits, further empowering anti-libertarian candidates for office. And thus we spiral into serfdom.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!
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* I use “libertarian” in this post to denote office-seekers and voters who prefer a government (at all levels) whose powers are (in the main) limited to those necessary for the protection of the people from predators, foreign and domestic.
Politics and Prosperity 