A “Trickle-Down Economy” Government: Relaxed First, Authoritarian Later

The theory of trickle-down economics imagined: the rich get benefits from the government, and the prosperity which results 'trickles down' the economy to the poor, or, the rich get tax breaks, and the resultant additional income they have is invested into small businesses or used to employ more poor people. Perhaps one of the concept's inspirations was the law of gravity, just as gravity pulls liquid downward, so too does wealth trickle down to the poor. If the government believes in this image of a gravity-like, lawful and orderly process of trickling down, then the government does not have to intervene into the economy as an enforcer of law, but becomes a passive observer, a spectator, as the economy functions free from government interventions but still abides by the law of gravitational pull. Today trickle-down economics implies that the economy abides by natural and universal law. It is the government's job to first witness such a process within the economy and thereby resist the tendency to intervene. Just as one cannot do much about gravity but observe it, one cannot do much about the trickle-down effect, but must be grateful that it has been pointed out, even though it is difficult to imagine that human actors within the economy are determined/controlled by a non-human and universal law. 

Government believes that some higher authority is facilitating the functioning of a law-abiding economy, and so it recedes in importance and function in the economic sphere, in that, government seems to turn away from the economy. But this turning away is also problematic because it implies that the government is not the supreme power in matters of the economy. Some would be hesitant to give up the role of supreme power that government has played thus far, and so there may be some attempts to make the government seem all-powerful, more powerful than it actually is, and therefore comparisons between divinity and human government abound. The question becomes: can the government act against the trickle-down effect, or against gravity? Can the government meddle at all in this natural law of the economy which we call the trickle-down effect? At first, the passive/weak government just celebrates the 'innovativeness' of the trickle-down theory in its ability to show how the economy behaves in a law-abiding manner; initially, government is enamored by the theory/law, and theory exerts influence over the government.   

However, the receding of importance/turning away of the government may only be temporary, because as the trickle-down law has been observed in the economy, more authoritarian elements in the government can also come into power, elements who are themselves directly invested in the economy (and hence practical, political-economic actors who cannot afford to maintain a distance from the economy as pure theorists can) and anxious to see that the government has a more productive function in the economy by using the law of gravitational trickle-down to cement authority. The main function of these authoritarian elements is not to witness passively, but to monitor actively the flow of money and the eventual spread of prosperity within the economy. With the help of the tools that monitor the trickle-down effect, the government possesses a vantage point through which the entirety of the economy becomes an object of governmental knowledge. In a traditional theory, the rich are studied in isolation and the poor are studied in isolation, but with the trickle-down effect, the connectivity, the communication and the relation between the rich and the poor can be studied accurately, and the making of some into rich people and others into poor becomes the apparent; the very transaction in the economy is recorded by the government's tools, not the effect of the transaction on the people. The movement towards the study of the trickle-down effect is a movement away from sociology, which studies classes in isolation, towards the field of socio-economics, which studies non-isolated social classes interacting in the economic sphere. It is a movement away from economics, which in its primitive form is inspired by sociology and concentrates its study to classes in isolation, towards a study of the economic activities of the population in its entirety, including the rich and the poor under the same topic as actors in the market. 

The very material flow of money which regularly makes some rich and others poor becomes visible for once, the economy is seen as an economy at work and as 'alive.' As wealth trickles down, it highlights the channels through which it passes, making these channels visible objects of scrutiny and control via government intervention; the goal for government is to do the bidding of the law, meaning that the law of gravity has to be enforced no matter what. As the passage of money through the economy is traced, it enables the monitoring closely of points where the flow is hindered, the points that need fixing or removal from the economic system; (a flow does not 'jump' over the different individuals/groups of the economy, but it is in contact with everything that falls in its path, so that it implies a completeness of knowledge, a clarity of knowledge and a truthfulness of the knowledge generated.) After a relaxed government celebrating the natural lawfulness of the economy, there arises a more authoritarian and exploitative government using the trickle down law and the consequential visibility of the whole economic system for interventions in the name of the law.