Role Inflation

All that lovely free money is just so addictive

German children using billion-mark notes as building-block toys. Image credit: Highbrow

Representative democracy is the system in which cynical incompetents promise ignorant foolish voters free ice-cream forever. By its very nature, representative democracy abjures intelligent responses to exogenous shocks and instead substitutes populist responses that create even worse shocks later. This is because very few voters are both well-informed and capable of reasoned judgement. People, for the most part, vote based on half-digested cliches, empty soundbites, habit, and emotion. Even though politicians are in general quite stupid, those who succeed do so because they grasp the need to tell simple-minded lies to a simple-minded electorate.

Not surprisingly, the “policies” that emerge are invariably sub-optimal and very frequently disastrous. But because the consequences of bad policies don’t arrive instantly, the average voter is utterly unaware of the causal chain. Each problem seems, to ordinary people, to emerge from nowhere and is definitely not the result of voting for some inane halfwit whose babble appealed to them because it seemed to offer something for nothing.

Since the beginning of this century we’ve seen populism sweep the globe and an increasingly unsavory band of neofascist demagogues swept into power. We’ve had the grotesque stupidities of Brexit, Trump, Modi…