The Superrich Endanger Democracy
zeit.de
zeit.de
In our very recent election Liberal Alliance was decimated and Lars Seiers brothers party was voted in and is now bigger than Liberal Alliance.
Now, I’m not suggesting anything that you will need a tinfoil hat for. There are a lot of reasons things went the way they did for these two political parties, and most of them could have happened without the easy access to money. I do, however, think it’s a worrying show of how just much influence, a single billionaire can have in a small democracy, compared to the average citizen.
Many people I’ve met are completely apathetic of their voting powers. They don’t want to read current events, research candidates, go to town meetings, and work to inform fellow voters. On the other hand, many people are also burned out from going to work, getting kids ready, making dinner, putting them to bed, working 80 hours a week, etc. And they may not have the cognitive abilities to analyze data to figure out what is true and false.
Democracy relies on having numerous “informed” voters, but what happens when the machine gets so complicated that there are not sufficient “informed” voters?
Democracy relies on level headed people doing politics.
Want power? — cling to men with more power.
My advice, drop in onto their caucus and start talking something big. Dress smartly. Make an impression of you being a "big man."
Believe me, it works.
I was a complete nobody on a work visa in Canada, yet I crashed on nearly every caucus party Christy Clarke had over 6 years I was there, and was making sure to make big fuzz with my appearance every time.
So maybe money does work? Or perhaps the LA's leadership is focusing on exactly the wrong reasons?
[0] https://politiken.dk/indland/politik/FV19/art7244111/Erhverv...
That tends to create a lot of internal friction, which became very obvious as the election results rolled in, and they all started backtalking each other and pointing fingers.
Maybe it's obvious, but LA is a political party I intensely disagree with. In my perspective, if they want to stand a chance in the next election, they need to do some serious restructuring, otherwise the internal friction will end them.
It seems to me to run counter to the democratic idea that an individual’s opinion matters. Either individuals are good at forming their own opinions from the world and voting is the practical realization of that into a government, or the electorate is an unthinking blob to be managed, as it will only vote for that for which it has been sufficiently inundated with propaganda, in which case the whole election is somewhat of a farce to begin with.
Why isn’t the will of the people (given an equal opportunity market for people to buy mass media advertising) respected more?
And concentration of resources as happens with Social media and news channels
I really don’t see how this isn’t a system working as intended. Freedom of expression is freedom to spread propaganda.
Either the electorate is to be respected and their opinions held as valid regardless of their media consumption, or propaganda is too dangerous and effective and elections are just a farce. I’m not sure you can have it both ways.
I would agree with you, if we wouldn't live in a day and age where facts are relative and truth is completely malleable.
The scenario is akin to computer security. Sure it is wrong for a hacker to manipulate flaws in the system enmasse but the underlying susceptibility to the bullshit is the root cause. Even if you stop that bad actor the root cause remains open to all with evil intent.
If I were to spend trillions on the worst political campaign - say "lets ban the anti-retrovials and give everyone AIDS" in a remotely sane electorate I would have essentially zero impact other than the massive reputational damage I would take. In a terrifyingly insane one where the worst casually proposed idea achieved 100% acceptance the entire populace would be dead without outside military intervention.
Fixing it is easier said than done but would involve education and deep investment in critical thinking.
Because some people don’t like the implications of what the public wants. Around the west you’re seeing a dramatic shift in people becoming more conservative in certain fronts, especially on the points of immigration and nationalism. The folks who dominate the kinds of sites that write about that stuff can’t abide by that. So they have strong incentives to denounce that all as the product of sheep-like voters being influenced by propaganda.
We had (in Poland) at least one party which suddenly sprung into existence with decent poll results, was very pro big business and had pretty shady financing.
Fortunately they(especially their leader) were incompetent.
What I'm trying to say is that to me your account is not surprising at all.
"Movement Now" is just starting. It was created by multimillionaire (net worth $300 Million) member of the parliament after he was denied promised position in the cabinet.
They claim to somewhere between classical liberal and libertarian, but they are in fact by-the-book Ayn Rand objectivists. However that label has some negative connotations (for good reason), so officially they stick to the claims of classical liberalism, libertarianism and individual freedom above all.
It's a very interesting party, and as their recent collapse has shown, a party of very strong-willed individualists.
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/future-perfect-3/e/6138...
A few articles that go through the same information as summaries or interviews for those who don't want to listen to the whole thing:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federal...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/29/18629799/federa...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/1/18629859/judge-r...
Sure, a lobbyist pays $10k a plate to fund a politician.. But its not buying a vote. The lobbyist is buying face-time with the politician.
And given a rapport over many times, the politician learns to trust the lobbyist. Those other people (citizens) don't really know anything, the politician thinks. The lobbyist comes from inside industry, and 'really' knows what's happening and why.
Lobbyists are just a paying type of royal advisors. And even if they weren't paying cash for plates of food, they would use their backing interests' money and power to exert 'assistance' in other ways.
Sure, "lobbying" can get scummy if you push the graft envelope but for the most part "lobbyists" are just people from special interest groups who have made a career out of arguing their case to the politicians.
We understood that already, and separated the legislature, an executive, and judiciary branches of power. They are not bad, they are necessary, but you don't want them to mix.
We are now learning that the power of money must be separated as well. Money is not bad, but it should not mix with the rest.
And right now, they happily do.
I've lived in West Africa for 2 years, and here you have plenty of "rich man of the village". But you would not consider them rich yourself.
In authoritarian countries, the ruler is usually superrich billionaire. In the western world there are limits, but they work better to one direction than another.
Clever politician may be able to get millions, but rarely hundreds of millions and never billions. Billionaires however can turn their money into politics. Only direct middling for political campaign is limited. Superrich can create institutions, whole universities, think tanks, academic positions, grants and lobbying groups. Even political parties.
The superrich then only needs to lobby a few entities instead of every country in Europe, or every region for that matter. Just take the latest lobbying success against the citizens of EU, the content filter & the link tax, proposing those two on the national level would never have been possible, because of the ease of circumvention, but on a EU level it can actually be enforced.
If you want to keep transnational organizations like the EU, then you need to make it immune to lobbying, which first of can't be done and maybe not even wanted. Not all lobbying is immoral per se, because parliaments are not experts on every subject, it becomes immoral when it has an obvious quid pro quo situation.
What you is left with is to stop people of becoming superrich and/or stripping wealth from the already existing superrich. Good luck passing that in any legislative chamber we have today.
Reality is politicians take a lot of money but do not need to declare where they take it from and right after their politician career will get well paid job from the people they regulated a short time before.
Think of the same comment put the other way around. What do you think of people "selling their vote for a mere promise of free sausages?"
Edit: ok downvoters, name me one example of any society ever in which political and economic power for some class of people was out of balance. Rome? No, the patricians has all the economic and political power. The ussr? No, the high ranking party members had all the economic and political power. China? No. The United States? No. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
So, if I might suggest a solution, the answer to a situation where corporate power is transnational is a transnational union movement; something like an international congress of unions or maybe like the IWW.
If you have a federal government with the power that the US government had before 1930, you don't have as much money being spent on campaigning and lobbying, because the influence isn't worth as much, because the government can't do as much.
Back to your comment that I was replying to. What I meant was, with a limited government, if the bottom 90% of the people want to take all that the top 10% have, if "taking all that the rich have" isn't one of the things that the government is allowed to do, then the 90% can't do that. ("Allowed" in the previous sentence means "allowed by the constitution", not "allowed by the people in charge".) In a country actually ruled by law, there are genuine restrictions on what the government can do...
... until there aren't. The US Constitution can be amended. It was amended to allow for income tax, for example. If the 90% wanted it badly enough, they could probably get it, but it would take more than just yelling at their representatives. They'd have to actually go through the process.
Then there's the problem that you seem to be talking about in your reply, that the representatives tend to be from among the rich. That puts another obstacle on the peoples' ability to just take what the rich have...
... until the people get tired of it all, take over the streets, and just burn it all down.
In the example you just gave, with the government just standing by, political power devolves to the major corporations acting in the area. Early US corporations historically had their own police forces and armies (the pinkertons). In the late 1800s strikers fought many gun battles with private security hired by barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, using in some cases artillery and machine guns. Does that not count as political power?
Nowadays, the super rich have more power in practice than many of the autocrats who were thrown out by democratic movements of the long forgotten past, so their hubris leads some of them to work towards establishing autocratic structures again, believing that those will always work in their favour (newsflash: they don't, but that's another topic). Since capitalism alone does not put a check on this development, it is no longer a good ally of democracy. Still a useful tool when applied with measure and combined with other tools, but not an ally.
Edit: not saying capitalism is equivalent to slavery. I’m just saying that the conflict between capitalism and freedom can be boiled down to a conflict between human rights, and property rights.
To me the flaws in that premise seem pretty straightfoward - there is no truth that democracy seeks to uncover. Democracy is a highly effective release valve so that if the situation becomes intolerable then the ruling class is changed out. If you want to change the world, you need to convince the ruling class that change is needed, or the people that something else needs to be tried.
The idea that some people have more decision making power than others isn't some subversive perversion of what is good in the world, it is normal. Democracy is fantastic compared to a monarchy - the competition is systems where a lunatic ruler can appoint a horse to government. That is a pretty simple example of why democracy should be preferred.
Capitalism and Democracy are bedfellows because they are both the best systems we know of for filling roles that need to be filled - how to allocate resources and who gets to be in charge respectively. The problem isn't that the wealthy are also powerful, the problem is that the people are as disorganised and fractured in opinion as the politicians who represent them.
Sure there is. In fact, you are about to illustrate it unwittingly:
> Democracy is a highly effective release valve so that if the situation becomes intolerable then the ruling class is changed out.
The truth democracy seeks to uncover is “is the leadership intolerable”; the corruption of democracy into plutocracy frustrates discovering g that answer as he weighting of political power by wealth biases toward showing the actual ruling class as tolerable irrespective of whether that is the mass feeling, and makes democracy a led effective safety valve.
I guess it is not surprising because the Zeit has been the mouthpiece for a globalist neo-liberal elitist agenda in Germany for a long time. Their editor in chief is a warmongering (has argued for a preemptive attack on Iran for example) Havard educated neo liberal.
This despite being self-proclaimed conservative, nationalist, and right wing during the election.
It’s a bit scary what happens when history is lost on a new generation.
A lot of capital has tied itself to economic efficiency, which has a strong tendency to dictate globalism, which also lent it political support from both classical liberals and modern liberals (note, I am not using the word 'liberal' in the broadest sense, commonly used in the USA), for whom the increase in on the ground freedom of labour and capital was mostly considered worth the cost of creating the ultra rich.
Now however, a block of the newly created ultra rich have the wealth of small nations and are asking themselves, 'What if everywhere was small nations, wouldn't it be nice if we could become sovereign and rule openly over a balkanised mass of city-states?'.
This appears at ground level in the spectacle of little old ladies who worship Thatcher, confusingly starting to parrot the talking points of late 1990's anti-capitalists. Boris Johnson saying 'fuck business' during the Brexit negotiations with the EU was no accident. And this transformation has been so fast that people paying close attention to political swings would be prone to whiplash.
Ultimately though, the real power is held by the already globalised Zaibatsus, as they have control of production, so I also suspect that the princelings-to-be may be sticking their neck out a bit far right now.
If their petty bigotted spite is such that they would rather see no benefits when they are in need than benefits to all including "the other" the problem is clearly them. It certainly isn't some fiscal calculus involving actual resource constraints and yields.
It doesn't require some secret imaginary elite - they are perfectly capable of causing backwards ruination on their own. Even if they stumble upon an obvious truth (cooperation with outgroup would benefit us) they blame the outgroup's existence for the lack of cooperation instead of their moronic bigotry.
The truth is the problem has always been them and their bigotry. Deprived of an other they will other themselves and deploy divide and conquer tactics - on themselves. Set the dark brown hair against the black or A blood type against the Bs.
Though TFA was originally written in English, so if you're on HN you'll want to read the original anyway.
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-04/kapitalismus-demokrat...