The malignant tumor
The regulatory state is the malignant tumor that is killing us
In my last post, The real cancer, I hinted to the point that I would like to describe our problems as the consequences of societal pathologies. Western liberal democracies are all suffering from the cancerous growth of oppressive bureaucracies, corrupt politicians and powerful special interest groups. They are sucking the lifeblood out of democracies creating a curious mix of communism and fascism.
What is the cause of my wife’s cancer?
Let me ask an easier question: what is the cause of cancer? Is it a genetic, environmental or metabolic disease? Is it a combination? What is most likely? Possibly a bit of all, we will never know because the system responsible for it is suffering from a terrible disease called democracy.
Democracy is hopelessly and irreparably corrupt and I am not talking about party politics and electoral corruption. The concepts of democracy and the way it operates gave birth to whole classes of leeches that are slowly destroying their hosts. And they have about as much respect for us as actual leeches do.
Society
We, humans, evolved from pack animals. The pack is the biological foundation of society. It has structure, it has competition and competence hierarchies, unspoken rules and behavioural expectations, voluntary social interactions with an expectation of reciprocity. This is what living in a free society means. Cooperation, trade, mutual help, communication.
There is no absolute freedom, we are still bound by social norms, but those are seldom static and oppressive. In primitive societies the worst punishment was exile, banishment from the tribe. Morality evolved from our existence in a tribal world.
The state
The state is a different story. The state is an institution of power, or to be more precise, an institution with a monopoly on the use of force. In its idealized form, that power is only used to protect us from enemies from without and lawbreakers from within. We could say that we delegate our power for legitimate violence to the state.
There is a distinct difference between society and the state: the essence of society is voluntary interactions; the essence of the state is power and compulsion.
Democracy
I have a never-ending, ever repeating dispute with people who say: stop complaining, this is a democracy, this is what the people want. If you want to live in a democracy, you have to accept its rules. My answer is always no, this is not what people want, but it is most likely what they deserve.
We treat the idea of democracy as some sort of Deity. As an ideal we have to strive for. Since Democracy is our ultimate goal, the more democracy the better.
But, of course, democracy as an ideal is nonsense. An impossibility. I tried to explain this in some more detail in my post “Why Marxism”. The short version is this: democracy has two dimensions: The number of people the decisions affect (let’s call it span); and the number of decisions that we choose to make collectively, (let’s call that scope). Democracy works best when these are in inverse proportion.
The smaller the span, the bigger the scope can be and vice versa. If the span is really big, than the scope should stop with ‘thou shalt not kill’ and ‘honor your father’.
The aspect of democracy that enables the societal cancer is delegated decision making.
Delegation is not the problem; we delegate all the time. We do not tell the baker how to bake the bread or the car mechanic how to fix your breaks. We delegate the decisions about the details. The only thing we want to know is how much will it cost. That is where the buck stops, with you.
The problem with political decision making is that it has several layers and we have no way to control it. Especially its cost.
Politicians cannot do anything practical for us, all they can do is to delegate.
Politicians delegate to bureaucracies
Bureaucracies delegate to experts
Experts delegate to whomever pays them most
The actual providers/suppliers do not delegate, they capture.
Since this category also includes any and all special interest groups, I think we should refer to them as such: “special interest”
The only constant in this chain of delegation is the razor-sharp focus of every player on their own self interest. It is never about US, it is always about THEM, always about keeping the racket going.
They cannot exist without us, but we are just the excuse enabling them to keep the racket going.
Politicians want to get re-elected. The illusion of power (and the perks) are irresistible.
Politicians are highly corruptible, in ways sometimes even they cannot understand.Bureaucrats just want to keep their jobs, to get more power with less responsibility and their budgets steadily growing.
Experts, top bureaucrats and lobbyists just want to keep the corruption gravy train running and/or to get captured by special interest for juicy jobs through the revolving door between regulators and the industry.
Special interest is the corruptor but we cannot blame them alone, the corrupted bears equal responsibility.
In my post A web of interests, I explore these incestuous relationships in a little more detail.
They are so complex and intermingled that I do not see any way to reform them.
The problem of democracy is the extent to which it is corruptible.
The problem of Western civilization is the delusion that just a little more democracy can solve the problems that delegated decision making, id est: democracy itself created.
The regulatory state is a malignant tumor on society
In the end, it is all very personal. We live in a corrupt system that makes it vey difficult to find the truth and nearly impossible to act on it. A system that we have to learn to bypass.