When Democracy, Shouldn't

For the sake of efficiency, government is almost always the least effective way of delivering anything. There are many reasons for this, and some exceptions, but as a rule, the intervention of government into any economic realm must be justified by a separate priority. Briefly, this is because the priorities of those managing provision are divorced from those in the private sector which encourage efficiency. Ultimately, whether this is provided by the government directly, or through a government-owned organisation, the top of the hierarchy remains the same. Politicians and bureaucrats. In democratic systems, neither of these groups have an interest in long-term successful provision, nor do they have an incentive to move anywhere beyond acceptable service and efficiency. A good example of the former is in the pension allowances in the public sector, which can be potentially crippling in the future, but are totally disconnected from the original person who granted them. The only people, in that instance, who have an incentive to look that far into the future are the employees, who are the main beneficiaries. If anything, the politician also benefits from the extra political support. And while not an entirely concrete point to make in this case, anyone who has interacted with a licensing body will probably attest to the veracity of the latter statement, as there often seems to be a tendency to either stall the issue for personal convenience of not exerting themselves, or creating problems where none exist for the sake of justifying their own job. However being that their service is a legal requirement, they can do as they please in almost all cases. The exact characteristics of provision will likely differ by system, as a direct democracy may elect a representative to oversee, whereas a representative democracy would be more likely to appoint a candidate. But regardless of how selection is conducted, even the most confident manager will have the ever-present knowledge that their failure can be near infinitely covered by the entire weight of the government, and its access to credit. But so too is there a great likelihood that any successes will not be credited to the political agent closest to being in charge, or whomever is seen to be in charge from the political sphere. In part, this also links to why nationalisation is usually so popular. In the immediate aftermath, the government will inherit most of the private sector trained managers and employees in general, but particularly the managers. And so the policy will appear to be an enormous boon either for the treasury or consumers. But over time, the institutional rot sets in as a result of the perverted incentives, and erode these advantages. The incumbent government or representative will be blamed, and in response, either more funding will be thrown at it, or it will be privatised. This has broadly been the story of every nationalised industry in the UK. Though again, exceptions to every rule, Royal Mail in this case, which was made profitable overall by the proficiency of the parcel delivery section. And so, any of these services must be justified on other grounds, typically either some moral imperative or strategic necessity. Ergo, in order to increase the power and influence of the government, politicians clash on the morality of economic interference, and sometimes the strategic necessity, though this is less rare. As a result, public discourse is dominated by these two factors, so that few people can even envision an alternate arrangement. Thus, it is often concluded that the only ones who would want to take these provisions out of public hands are either stupid or morally bankrupt. Depending on how charitable one wants to be about intentions, the bureaucracy and particularly the political apparatus that presides over this obfuscation is either deliberately misleading liars, or honest but corrupted by power. It has often been noted that despite most countries having at least one of their major political parties being in favour of smaller government, the government presence nearly continually grows. Often, cutting back in one area is then only compensated for with expansions in other areas. Despite living in the wake of the great deregulation spree of Thatcher, Reagan in the case of Americans, the government has at least as much presence in our lives as ever, almost certainly more. It's hard to even quantify it with the presence of the surveillance state. But we voted for all this, so it's okay, right? Well, as was somewhat fleshed out in a previous video, not really. The list of policies on offer and package together when we must choose between at best a handful of parties is significant, incomplete and unreliable. So instead of attempting to pass out a predictive model of how the candidates, representatives and wider parties will vote and react to a changing situation, many of us try to minimise this workload by using heuristic measures. Evidence of a similar disposition to ourselves, or one that we believe has the qualities we would like to see in a leader. This process leads to a sort of selection towards The US presidency is probably the most distilled version of this phenomenon, though granted media portrayal helps this quite a bit. Whether these individuals actually live up to their personas is another matter, but being that their career can often hinge on their ability to maintain a desirable image, it will likely only ever be a matter of opinion whether they do or do not. And these are the individuals in which we invest the most power, more often because of their ability to move a crowd and appear in the right way than their credentials or actioned purity of purpose, or their competence. To the contrary, we largely crave outsiders to whatever order currently exists. We deliberately select people unqualified for the position because they hold a contrarian view or disposition. So why not skip the representatives and use direct democracy instead? While this eradicates some of the problems, it accentuates others. Problems of rational ignorance and rational abstention that were alluded to previously are put into sharp focus when voting is conducted directly on an issue-by-issue basis, and will likely increase with time due to voter and political fatigue. In essence, this means that a small number of highly motivated political actors can dictate outcomes favourable to themselves at the expense of others so long as the issue is sufficiently complex, or costs sufficiently small that the majority would be rationally incentivised to simply ignore the issue because the cost of educating themselves and getting involved outweighs the benefits of doing so. Athenian democracy acknowledged both of these problems better than we do in the modern west, perhaps because they existed in something closer to the natural landscape than our own moral landscape. The sort of pseudo-demagogues and political celebrities we suffer could be, and often were, ostracised into an involuntary exile. Whether that would even be a possibility in the internet age is an open question, with Edward Snowden being probably the closest example of such at the time of writing, though I am sure that we could achieve something like that if we were to really put our minds to it. But on the issue of engagement, far from mitigating it, they embraced the otherwise peculiar disposition required for such things by restricting the vote and direct political engagement to a limited proportion of the inhabitants. Not only that, but other elements of society were directed towards a sort of political philosophical legalistic focus, far from our modern view of avoiding such topics in civil company. The Greek symposium, and later the Roman convivium, often embraced these topics. The process of trial by jury was a much more extensive process also, with at least 501 jurors taking part, often over a thousand. So issues of law and legality were much more central to Greek life than they are today, therefore a culture of justice was held much more culturally centrally than in the modern west. Yet even there, corruption, overbearing bureaucracy, demagoguery and national hypocrisy have become defining elements. In the midst of the partisan chaos, it could be hard to get an accurate picture of the situation. So much like in the cases of democratic Athens, republican Rome, Venice and republican Florence, future generations will likely see us in exactly the same light. All of this is meant to supplement the more often cited arguments against democracy from a liberty-minded perspective, which suggests something like democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner. And while conceptually this holds true, it seems not to be so accurately played out in direct democracies, most notably the highest profile example of Switzerland. The separation into much smaller cantons allows for a greater degree of adherence to the will of people by minimizing the total distance between the ideal and the actioned policy in each canton. This may also have the byproduct of minimizing the distance between groups which may otherwise be antagonistic towards each other. Or perhaps separating government up into so many smaller entities results in proportionally higher costs to administer any otherwise desired policies. Another factor entirely, potentially, but regardless it would appear to result in a government that is much smaller and less intrusive. The issue with this example, however, is that in vesting sovereignty into such a decentralized entity makes decisive decision-making somewhat more difficult. And so the model may not be perfectly applicable to countries slightly less impossible to invade. In this vein it is perhaps notable to return to a previous point. All government intervention proposals become boiled down to matters of morality and strategic interest. While there are other dimensions to consider, clearly these are concerns in some sense. Not only would I not claim to have an objective answer on what is the appropriate level of intervention for all situations, I would not even claim that every situation has a perfect degree of intervention at all times. For the sake of stability in food supply and peacetime, I dare say that it would be suicidal to take such things into a centrally planned model. But if a total war were to break out it would be equally catastrophic to leave the matter totally to market forces. So at what point in the transition between these two states do we exert more control over agriculture? To impose tariffs or subsidies to ensure that the sector is always somewhat stable in case of war? Or only when hostilities begin to become possibility? Do we instead subsidize our strongest agricultural sub-sectors to create a reliance by our geopolitical competitors to dissuade war in the first place, in a sort of economic warfare model? In the same sort of vein, secure weapons manufactories are evidently a necessity in compensating for any sort of serious wartime attrition. But such facilities are useless without the material inputs required. So how far up the supply chain is it necessary to secure? And once again, at what point in conflict build up? Being that democratic systems of most kinds have deliberate difficulty in making decisive decisions, enacting such wide-ranging and impactful measures within a crucially tiny time span is an almost impossible task. Which is why, in just about every system, all pretenses of retaining the normal mechanisms are abandoned during a crisis. Either by law or by convention, the legislature will render itself largely toothless to the whims of one or a handful of individuals. Yet this mechanism will almost always play itself out in a largely unregulated mechanism, to the detriment of future stability. It is on this altar that the Roman Republic was famously bled with successive pushes towards continuous rule by a single individual, particularly by Marius, Sulla, and Gaius Julius Caesar. The US has been gradually moving in a similar direction for at least the last century, when war and the Great Depression allowed the president to seize more and more power for the executive, which has rarely been returned. Both of these examples illustrate the point well, because both cultures emphasize individual ambition as prime virtues, yet both rely on almost selfless motivation to return power seized in a crisis, in stark contrast to their own individual interests, and by some extension, the interests of their branch of government. So, instead of leaving the matter of who should near individually rule us with functionally limitless power, to the fickle whims of the mob's choice of the lesser of two evils spat at us by party infrastructure, almost certainly on entirely separate issues of best or arbitrary dispositional heuristics at worst, should we not ensure that, as this seems to be a necessary function of crisis management, any rash actions taken over the course are easily reversible once the crisis has passed, and hands that use such power are responsible and suitable for the position, and that the whole process is considered ahead of time and properly modelled, though not necessarily regulated, so that we're not simply ad-hoc-ing our way into a demagogic dictatorship or mismanaged avoidable catastrophe.