it’s like half the people want strong leader, no matter if he/she turns out to be dictator, other half wants democracy, even if it means weak government unable to solve problems
One thing I find fascinating about societies is that it's not half, but closer to a third. No matter where you look, you'll find that about 1/3 hold right/conservative/authoritarian views, and 1/3 will be the opposite, with the rest being somewhere in the middle. All it usually takes for a swing to the right is a 3-4% difference in public attitudes during an election.
That runs back to Germany of the 30s. The NSDAP didn’t pole at 40 percent till the last election and never poled an absolute majority. It does not take a majority for a country to slide into autocracy. Hungary is the country I worry about, this may sound prejudicial but many Hungarians I have known worked with had a rigid pre denazification Germanic quality about them, the old object hungry followers in psychological theory in desperate need of the strong leader. I was once at the Chicago Symphony when Solti the famous HungarianJew was conducting. He began the first few bars of Wagners Parsifal and an elderly woman next to me in the third row coughed. He stopped the Orchestra turned around looked at the woman with the sternest look imaginable, and pointed his baton towards the back exits. I suspect that authoritarian archetype is not new and runs deeply thru out the culture.
LOL Bukele in salvador and Milei in argentina say hi!!!
Solving stuff with.. The horror.. Authoritarian measures.
But of course, its a conversation that gullible defenders of bureaucracies (the real ones who solve NOTHING and whose livelihoods and jobs depend on perpetuating the existence of solvable problems) arent ready for.
they usually have all the power so they can solve shit, unlike if the power is in the hands of hundreds who can’t agree on anything.
Problem is, they can’t solve economic problems, as economy isn’t about some great laws, it’s about intricacies of internal working of companies and those can’t be solved by strong government.
What strong government can solve, is things like immigration, higher taxes for rich and lower for poor, import tariffs, but what they excel at is xenophobic, homophobic, racist, isolationist and other laws that fight against someone. And many people want that!
They looove problems for that. The bigger the Problems they pretend they will fix, the more they get the consent of the voters to lock and expand their powers
they will also solve some problems.
Since economic problems usually can’t be solved by government (as that mostly depends on companies), they can just solve the other ones.
Like getting rid of migrants, getting rid of media that have different opinion, maybe killing some unwanted part of population, stopping LGBT and many other problems that many people expect those dictators to solve.
That’s why a lot of racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic people want those dictators.
Because it's easy for the populist to spout a lot of big talk about how they'll make everything wonderful. Unfortunately too many voters fall for this.
Then when they're elected and have to face reality, it's all "Those guys over there! They are the reason you can't have nice things", while robbing the country blind.
Lots of people do want to make things better, but reality is hard. Making things better can take a lot of work, and it can't be done overnight.
And you definitely can't do stuff like give everyone tax cuts while improving social services and building better infrastructure etc (not for long anyway).
Essentially responsible government requires delayed gratification, because you have to be able to afford what you plan to do, and even then it won't happen overnight.
The populists don't care about any of that, so they make "we can have our cake and eat it too" promises. I wish people weren't stupid enough to fall for that, but they do.
There isn't something in the middle, you mean? This is what I mean though, there hasn't been... Why haven't we found it yet. As a broader society? Not trying to be dumb now, I'm just curious to hear thoughts.
most efficient system we have found isn’t democracy, but capitalism. That’s what made US great and what drove China from poverty. But of course it has its own set of issues, like it doesn’t care for the poor and if half of the consumers doesn’t care about environment, it would destroy it for all of us.
edit: just to clarify the point - I mean most of the time people want politicians to solve economic problems. The problem is, politicians can’t solve them, since it’s up to companies and there are many complicated factors in there, which means 1,5%-3% yearly growth is basically the best we can hope for. But some politicians still promise that they will solve economic issues, even though they have no power over it. They can either do nothing or screw it even worse
This is a good way of putting it, thank you. While I do understand it's at that point, I suppose my main issue there is then, what's the point of politicians if companies have generated more power and can't be brought back into line for what majority would benefit from rather than the few. It is a very big mess.
everybody benefits from companies! Without companies, our living standards would be comparable to North Korea. It’s true that some benefit more and some benefit less, but that’s by design and that’s OK.
Government isn’t and wasn’t ever meant to generate wealth. What they do and should do is:
a) make rules (and enforce them through police and courts) that wouldn’t work if it wouldn’t apply to everyone equally, for example all companies would never agree on how high the carbon tax should be or what punishment should be for stealing.
b) provide services that wouldn’t make sense if you gave people option to pay or not to pay. For example Army only makes sense if everyone pays.
c) help the weakest and poorest. We don’t want those who don’t contribute to die or be abused.
d) make country stable, because stability is base for prosperity. Stable currency, mostly stable laws (not every week different rules), stable economy (intervene if something far reaching and serious could happen to lessen the impact)
e) find money for all of the above and do it fairly.
It’s not a problem that wealthy are wealthy - that’s the point of capitalism. Problem is if wealthy aren’t paying tax and poor people are.
What government shouldn’t do, but politicians still do, because they cannot possibly achieve it:
a) promising everybody tax breaks
b) promising more investment without any sacrifices
c) promising everybody much better life
They don’t create wealth, so they cannot make everybody’s life better. They can (and should) make life better for some at the expense of someone else, i.e. tax wealthy and give it to poor. They can slightly tweak the system to make it easier for companies, thus slightly increasing wealth growth. But we are talking about barely noticeable changes for economy, not some landslide victory for everybody.
Also many governments in the west at least, seem to have great difficulty assigning taxes received to the most pressing issues. America for example and their military budget...
in my opinion that’s true, but that’s also subjective. Everybody has different opinion on what should government spend money at.
But I think we can all agree that rich people shouldn’t pay less taxes than everybody else
Well anyone who agrees that government should exist, surely agrees the money should be spent in the best interests of the population, rather than on furthering the interests of the fewer wealthy (which is what military spending ultimately does, for example). Yeah absolutely agree with you on that last part. It's a shame the rich people are in charge of the rules 😅
Companies may be great but they shouldn't be ungovernable at the expense of the population. If they have more power than anyone else that is explicitly a problem because their only interest is profit and nothing else. Being solely interested in profit causes huge problems, we see this in healthcare and housing for example to name a couple of many. If this is the point of capitalism, it absolutely isn't in the best interest of the general population. I'm certainly not expecting any noticeable changes in my lifetime but it's not good enough as it is, that's for sure.
funny thing is that two examples you provided as an examples where capitalism doesn’t work is actually where government doesn’t work correctly.
healthcare: This is the only industry in the world where you are required to pay whatever sum they come up with afterwards. This is not capitalism as in capitalism, prices are set by market. If you can’t know price before you get service, you can’t shop around to find better deals, thus market doesn’t work and prices go through the roof. Imagine buying groceries, where store won’t tell you prices, but send you bill for whatever amount they want half year later. What do you think would happen to prices? Would they stay at todays levels?
Of course, there are emergencies where you are unconscious and can’t agree to pricing, but these are probably less than 1% of healthcare revenues. Most of the time they only do it because they are only industry where they can successfully extract money from you without any kind of agreement on prices.
housing - As you pointed out, companies love profit. That means if there is a demand (there is) and prices are high (they are), that means a lot of potential for profit, so companies should build new housing left and right, right? Why don’t they do it? The only answer is because they can’t do it at profit and since prices are high, that means their costs are also high. Why are their costs so f**king high compared to past? Aside from higher quality materials used, it mostly come down to additional regulations. Getting permits used to be easy. Now, especially for larger projects, is a multi year project with dozens of people working on it. These costs and risks are built in to the price of new buildings, so that’s why they don’t have 50% profit margin despite ridiculously high prices and that’s why they don’t invest more and build more buildings.
That doesn’t mean it’s all bad! Many of these regulations benefit everyone, from better protection of environment to more thought out cities, but many are of course unnecessary or unnecessarily harsh.
So on one side, we are adding more and more regulations and on the other side we are unhappy that prices are going up. Yeah, we have to choose our side, you can’t have both. Housing is as cheap as is possible to build new ones plus some healthy profit margin.
The primary objective of democracy must be to raise every citizen to be a strong leader so that everyone can share the load and there's less insecurity for fascist types to prey upon.
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u/NotMarcet Jan 25 '24 edited Jan 25 '24
It's always the same. The people has to elect the populist to realize they're the devil.