The ruling party uses campaign financing laws, ballot access laws, redistricting plans, and other legal advantages of incumbency to disarm political opponents, including third parties. Indeed, given the reluctance of the media to criticize the party in power or to expose such coercive tactics, those parties that are most willing to result to such measures hold an almost insuperable political edge. The advantages of incumbency, which are magnified by the increasing power of the state over everyone's livelihood, further weaken any opposition to the ever more powerful state.

For example, established parties may seek to replace privately financed political campaigns with public funding. In this manner, opponents who might be morally opposed to the initiation of force can be effectively eliminated from the political process, since they can no longer accept funds at all (cf. pp. 4.11:152-3). Regulators are also well positioned to command political loyalty from those whom they regulate. Although such extortionary schemes are often illegal, a weakened press is unable or unwilling to expose them. In the long run, any reluctance of a ruling party to harness the interventionist powers of the state to its own advantage would tend to lead to the demise of that party. That advantage is greatest, of course, for a party whose ideology is relatively pro-interventionist. Thus in a mixed economy the political process in effect selects those parties and politicians who exploit such advantages most ruthlessly, as well as those who favor growing state power generally.