Then people say, “It’s sad to see that our government is corrupted by crooked individuals. The apathetic non-voters need to wake up and vote the bums out.”

Yes, the non-voters do need to “wake up,” but so do many of the people who make that very comment, as well as most of us, and for a different reason altogether.

The main problem isn’t that immoral people manage to manipulate the public into voting for them, but that the system itself encourages and rewards the passing of immoral laws. And the solution is not to merely vote new people into office, but to replace the terrible political philosophy currently governing the officials’ minds with a good one.

Let’s look at two possible career paths for a young politician, whom we will call Noam Nealy. When first running for office, he utters the usual platitudes.

He’s “pro-education” and “pro-environment,” as if anyone were consciously against these things. He makes the campaign promise to fight against “special interests” like corporations, particularly the biotech industry. All this, he says, is “for the collective good of society.”

First, let’s look at the sort of path that most people would disapprove of.

After some years in office, Nealy “sells out.” He takes campaign contributions from all of the “special interests” he pledged to combat. Moreover, he gives the corporations -- his former enemies -- numerous favors, like using public funds to bail them out of bankruptcy.

Here, Nealy is violating rights -- he is initiating the threat of physical force against the lower classes by extorting money from them to pay for this corporate welfare. After all, laws are backed by guns -- if you don’t follow a law, you will be fined, jailed, or even killed, with the punishment’s severity escalating till death if you don’t stop resisting.

Many people would just say, “It’s bad because Nealy is no longer working for ‘the people.’” Who are and aren’t “the people” anyway? Are the domestic unions, favoring the bailout, “the people”? Are the taxpayers, against the bailout, “the people”?

It was Nealy’s violation of rights that was wrong; not his “selling out” per se. Even if Nealy went along with his original plan, it would still be unethical.

This time around, let’s say Nealy can’t be bought. He doesn’t accept bribes, break his promises, or do anything “under the table.” Hooray.

Now witness what happens when Nealy maintains his promise to regulate industry and smash corporations.

Nealy decides to “protect” the public from the biotech companies by prohibiting genetic engineering.

If corporate scientists find a way to genetically-redesign human embryos to prevent babies from getting heart disease or cystic fibrosis, then that means Nealy’s law threatens violence upon anyone who wishes to use this technology to protect his own children from these fatal illnesses.

By keeping his campaign promise, Nealy causes needless death.

In this case, Nealy holds true to all of his original principles, such as fighting the biotech companies, yet his actions still bring destruction. It wasn’t the “special interest” bribery, as such, that corrupted him.

What’s really corrupt is the belief that civil servants have a moral license to violate individual rights to life, liberty, or property, whether on the behalf of financial donors or that imaginary animal we call “the public good.”

Even before Nealy first ran for office, he was destined to harm others inasmuch as he continued to believe that “the social good” justified passing laws that overlooked rights. Any politician’s disregard for property rights -- before and after he “sold out” -- was corrupt to begin with.

And we in Hawaii -- and the voting countries at large -- will always suffer at the hands of the real-life Noam Nealys, regardless of whether they “sell out” or hold true to their youthful, shallow collectivist “ideals,” until we learn that being an honest politician isn’t about shouting “education” a lot or keeping unwise promises to tyrannize, but in simply defending life, liberty and property for everyone.

Yes, we in Hawaii should “throw the bums out of office.” But, more importantly, the whole world ought to throw out the bad philosophy extolling “the public good,” and replace it with one that adheres to intransigent individual rights.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com

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