Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 52

Politics (6) is the struggle for power (6) and resources in society—who gets what, and how they get it—including control of information via the media (6). We can use the tools of politics to allocate scarce resources and to establish our favored vision of the social order (6).

Government (7) is an organization set up to exercise authority (7)—power that citizens view as legitimate (7), or “right”—over a body of people. It is shaped by politics and helps provide the rules (8), norms (8), and institutions (9) that in turn continue to shape the political process. Control of political information—that is, defining the political narrative (9) or acting as a gatekeeper (10)—is also a crucial form of power.

Politics is different from economics (11), which is a system for distributing society’s wealth. Economic systems vary in how much control government has over how that distribution takes place, ranging from a capitalist economy (12) (or regulated capitalism [12], like that of the United States), where the free market reigns but government may provide procedural guarantees (12) that the rules are fair, to a socialist economy (12), where government makes substantive guarantees (12) of what it holds to be fair distributions of material resources. Social democracy (13), a market economy that aims to fulfill substantive goals, is in the middle.