IT'S CALLED PUBLIC CHOICE, SETH.

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and children socialist agitators of all ages, including Seth Sandronsky, are obligated to dial up the rhetoric.  "Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system as ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations."

That Complex Proposition is right out of Marxian political economy, where the "capitalist state" is the executive committee for the ruling class.  "Two-party politics," or as the Serious People on the Sunday shows call it, "bipartisan compromise" might have the interests of elected officials and their bureaucrats and court intellectuals in mind, not necessarily those of the hypothetical capitalists extracting ever more surplus value.

There's never been much good done by those who affect to trade for the public interest, and dressing it up with the rhetoric of Scientific Management doesn't change the reality.  "Public power is the power to generate rents, and yes, rent-seekers seek rents, politicians generate them, and the combined effect is often to dissipate rents."  Comrade Sandronsky could have made a case for limiting the ability of governments to generate and dissipate rents, and provide additional procedural checks on corrupt public officials and unelected bureaucrats, but, this being Labor Day weekend, the polemics come first.

The contradictions of economic nationalism and the world order are growing. An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg. The worsening climate crisis that profits billionaires and corporations in the short-term as the political duopoly facilitates this ecocide is a wake-up call for movement politics.

Comrade Sandronsky is giving the same sort of speech about worsening conditions and contradictions of capitalism that have been popular for over 150 years.  We keep hearing the call for that movement (pronounced mewve-ment) politics for years, to no lasting effect.