I heard a short excerpt today from an interview with Eric Bolling, author of The Swamp.  Now “the swamp” is nothing new, nor are the warnings about it and the cries to drain it.  Probably one of the greatest legacies of President Eisenhower was his [unheeded] warning against the military-industrial complex.  Various authors since then have made a name for themselves exposing the rip-offs engineered by swamp people.  Few people are willing to support the swamp, but fewer still are willing to drain it.

One of the questions asked Mr. Bolling was how to put an end to the swamp.  His answer was to not allow government employees to become lobbyists for five years after their governmental service, and beyond that, simply, to shine the light on it, to expose it.  Swamp people would scatter like cockroaches do when the light is turned on, he said.

I’m sorry, but that is the equivalent of giving a cancer patient baby aspirin, and expecting it to cure him.  The “cure” is inadequate and useless, and deadly because it covers up the problem instead of dealing with it.

There is only one way the swamp will ever be drained, (if it’s even possible to do so.) That is by putting a wall of separation between government and business, such that no business can ever get an advantage over others by use of government legislation, regulation, or largesse.

Ayn Rand identified the problem decades ago.  “It is not a matter of accidental personalities, of ‘dishonest businessmen’ or ‘dishonest legislators.’  The dishonesty is inherent in and created by the system.  So long as a government holds the power of economic control, it will necessarily create a special ‘elite,’ an ‘aristocracy of pull,’ it will attract the corrupt type of politician into the legislature, it will work to the advantage of the dishonest businessman, and will penalize and, eventually, destroy the honest and the able.”  She went on to add, “Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial history – and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e. the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade….”

Many centuries ago, the Bible warned against people in positions of power allowing their decisions to be warped by a bribe, or of using their position to extort payments from the weak.  Just because modern man has built this into the fabric of his society does not change the evil inherent in its practice.  We must drain the swamp, by stopping the water from flowing into it in the first place.

[See the article “Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise,” in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal for the quoted passage.]

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