Power and Privilige

By Robert Wenzel

Whenever there is a situation where someone has the opportunity to make a  decision with regard to someone and how they can act in a given situation that person has a certain kind of power.

There is private sector power and government power.

In a private sector situation, a property owner may grant someone limited power in a situation or the property owner, himself, may exercise power over his property directly.

With government, of course, power is generally exercised without regard to private property.

What I want to discuss in this post is power itself. It can apply to private or government power, but it is obviously more abusive when it involves government.

The specific part of power I want to discuss is privilege and how certain people can get around power,

The first example is a minor example but it illustrates might point very well.

The other day at my office building somehow the discussion in the lobby came to my book, The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank,  I could see the lobby security guard was interested, so I asked him if he wanted a copy.

I went upstairs and brought down a copy, autographed it with a few pithy words about coming price inflation and gave it to him. The next morning when he saw me walking into the building, he came over and shook my hand and said some kind things about the book,

It just so happened that a couple of days later, at the last minute I switched the sports jacket I was wearing before heading to work and forgot to put in the new jacket my building swipe pass to get me to my floor in my office building.

I realized I did not have my building pass about a block before I got to my building.

Now, my building is a very high-security building and the lobby security guards don't break rules. If someone doesn't have a pass they can't get upstairs before office hours. Security is not allowed to let anyone up until 9:00 AM. I have seen this enforced time and again.

Since I get to the office between 5:30 AMm and 6:00AM, this was going to be a big problem. It meant I would have to head back home (20 minutes away) and waste a lot of time. But I knew the security guard that was on duty was the guard that shook my hand the other day. Thus, I thought he might overlook the rule not to allow anyone up without their swipe card. So I entered the building, explained to him what happened and he said, "Okay if no one is looking." And he swiped his card and I was on my way upstairs.

A more interesting situation occurred recently with a friend of mine. She comes from a very large near-third world country. Her mother is a very famous actress in the country. Her uncle is a very important movie producer. They live on an estate that has a full-time staff of 30 (including snipers on the roof). She was recently traveling in a Middle East country and was detained by police officials (It's complicated) but she was allowed to call her mother back home. After callig her mother, her mother immediately called the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister called the leader of the Middle East country. My friend, shall we say, was released very quickly---with apologies.

My point here is there is a lot of talk about "white privilege," when what is being referenced is just people working hard and getting ahead, That can be achieved with effort by anyone. There are no gates to such advance. Privilege comes into play when there is a point of power and most often, and most seriously, a government point of power, Most people are not going to see the rules changed or overruled for them at these points. But there is privilege for the few, be they celebrities, financiers of a regime or those in some other way related to the regime. In  those cases, the rules come down and the gates go up.

The only way to end this type of privilege is to eliminate government power, the fewer points of government power. the less points of privilege that cause access to be denied to most of us.

 Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher at EconomicPolicyJournal.com and at Target Liberty. He is also author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics