Tammany Hall is dead today, but the system is still alive and well in the Democratic Party

The Socialist Strategy

By Daniel Greenfield
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Government is essentially a national management system, taking on those tasks that it would be unwise or unworkable to turn over to the free market. Good government functions as intended. Bad government takes over the nation and becomes an absolute force, looting and raiding public resources, suppressing individual freedoms in order to keep itself in power. In olden days this sort of government was considered a tyranny.

Since government exists at public expense and distributes the money for itself, there is plenty of temptation for government to abuse its prerogatives by taking too much. Democracy is meant to force government to justify its actions to the public, and to give the public a veto over government power. For government in a democratic country to abuse its power and draw excessive funds from the public, it must first co-opt a sizable portion of the public by arguing that the funds will be used for their benefit. This is called power sharing.

Government shares its revenues with whoever holds power within a political system. In a non-democratic system, the number of people who receive their share is smaller. For example a king may share a portion of revenues obtained from the peasants with his nobility for the simple and practical reasons, that they can rise up against him and remove him, and that they function as local governments over the peasantry. Similarly a mob boss collects a share of the money stolen and seized by his soldiers, and then passes it back down to them. Nazi Germany implemented much the same system within the Nazi party, as did the Soviet Union within the Communist party and now in Putin’s Russia, through a system of bribes.

Such non-democratic systems form a pyramid in which a large number of money goes up the chain to a small number of people. Those at the top live very well. Those at the bottom live very poorly. As a result the system itself is impoverished. It can only thrive when it is parasitic on the free market. That is why the mob had to focus on America. It is why Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had to continually expand and find new countries to loot. It is why Putin’s Russia, having burned through a lot of the resources seized from its businessmen, is pushing forward on the military front. It is why King George III began pressing America, resulting in the American Revolution.

The situation in a democratic system is more complicated, but the end result is the same. In the United States, Tammany Hall set a model by harnessing the New York bureaucracy as their own revenue mill, expecting every municipal employee to pay to receive a job, and then pay for a promotion. The employees themselves would have to find ways to make money “on the job.â€