Political power as a strategy is far less useful for producing personal well-being and success then it is for protecting personal well-being and success. This is partly a structural feature, simply because actual human production of capital, human capital or otherwise, takes place at the individual and not the collective level. It may be aggregated or conveyed at the collective level, but it is not is easily produced. Many of the great political advances in securing of rights and responsibilities did not produce but rather followed development in those areas. Increased rights and responsibilities secured further development and prevented interference in the production process. But the creation or defense of opportunities is not the same process as the production of value, even if it effects it.
There are of course many examples where regressive political policies and structures were holding back the proper development and production of human capital. But the role of political protections and policies is not to produce development but to protect its production by individuals. Even regressive political structures generally have this as their goal, just with very specific biases that favor limited and perhaps not justified groups.
Even the law itself is a kind of protectionist policy, deliberately advantaging and disadvantaging certain strategies and opportunities that we believe to be anti-social, counter-productive, dishonest, exploitative, or pathological. Thus we have laws regulating or discouraging all kinds of strategies that actually do often technically work for the people who use them, from theft to pyramid schemes to strip mining to slavery to drug dealing to prostitution to insider trading to mail fraud to snake oil selling.
So in some ways the questions isn’t whether political protectionism is right or wrong. Very few people are willing to embrace the kind of pure ideological libertarianism of outright anarchy. Everyone just takes for granted that the things they want to protect are the right things, that their policy goals are justified. And that’s the real test, not whether political protections and prejudices exist. They must exist. That’s the whole point of them. The real question is how well their values and strategies and goals are justified. Whether they’re being used for a justifiable good or not.
In the past, it wasn’t so obvious that certain political arrangements weren’t justified. And overall there was much less regulation. Modern societies, as they have become more complex, have developed very complex systems of rules, guarantees, rights, and responsibilities to protect the many interested parties and the many different areas of production. A society that hasn’t got much beyond some families, a cluster of huts, and fishing will center most of its laws, prescriptions, rights, and admonitions around those features. They will have rules about those things, but very little about education, international trade and tariffs, foreign work visas, and corporate law.
The reasonable assumptions about the world and what it was and what it should be also varied greatly in past times. It wasn’t obvious, for example, that a rival clan that had just moved into your clan’s territory had some fundamental right (legal or otherwise) to compete for and exploit the same resources that your clan was using and relying on. Other than their ability to proactively secure and defend that right by force. Such rights and opportunities could often only be seen to exist by dint of being made manifest by deliberate, undeniable action, might makes right. It wasn’t obvious prima facie that such expectations were in any way reasonable or to be assumed simply based on the structure of the universe (which tended to deny such rights universally to everyone except those who deliberately secured them for themselves).
Probably one of the biggest difference between us and people of the past is how much we take for granted. We’ve made it so easy and so common to produce wealth and have long life and security that we’ve made it look easy, like something you can just assume the universe provides by nature. And because we’ve forgotten and look back with contempt on everyone before us who wasn’t so enlightened as ourselves (who stand by fortune upon the high perch of the collective inheritance of all the generations before us), we don’t understand how it all came to be or respect the processes by which those accomplishments accumulated. We just take the results for granted and despise the means by which they were won and preserved, like the spoiled children of wealthy entrepreneurs.
Making Nobody Happy 