No nation operates without social planning. Why? Because there are powerful people in every nation, and their first priority is to retain power — or better yet, enhance it. They succeed by doing social planning. Sometimes these powerful people are autocrats. They plan to make citizens more tractable, control speech and the news media, make scapegoats of minorities, and enrich themselves by force and fraud.1
Sometimes powerful people are democratically elected to public office. They presumably plan to improve the comfort, health, and life choices of the citizens they represent. In return, the citizens keep returning them to power.2
Sometimes powerful people take advantage of a frail democracy and see profit in transitioning to an autocracy. They form a “hybrid” government, one that has the ornaments of democracy — a legislature, judiciary, and active media — while planning to undermine it and retain political power indefinitely.3
I’ll focus on established democracies. They are the only societies in which social planning can be both well executed and admirably motivated. No person who is sane, reasonably informed, and able to travel would wish to live elsewhere. However, notice my qualification earlier: “they presumably plan….” As you will see, their plans can be deceptive.
A democracy fails if its governing bodies fall under the control of a rival power center. For example, the military might stage a coup and bring an autocrat to power. Fortunately, most democracies have developed a tradition of military subservience to civilian authority, and the threat to them is quite remote.
Failure is more likely to come from a more insidious power center, the superrich. They are insatiable; they dream of limitless wealth, regardless of the cost to their fellow citizens. If they aren’t constrained by the law, they will bend it until democratic society frays and breaks.4
Of course, the wealth of a nation is not limitless. To get a super-sized share of it, the superrich aim their budgetary plans at an economic sweet spot, a place where ordinary citizens struggle to keep hunger and illness at bay with just enough left to consume the products, services, and distractions the wealthy offer. It’s a difficult target to hit. Trying is risky, but the rewards are enormous.
When the superrich make budgets that aim too low, they can usually insulate themselves from public unrest, even though they cast no votes, make no executive orders, and hand down no verdicts. They are an oligarchy, a shadow government. They send lobbyists to the seats of power. They contribute billions to reelection committees. They offer the use of their jets, yachts, and vacation properties to legislators and judges. They own media outlets that distort facts and give legs to lies. They create propaganda that reinforces economic mythology. For instance, the idea of a “free market” is a fiction. Governments routinely subsidize businesses and rescue them from failure. Socialism is not a national poison and, in fact, big business depends on it for its viability. And the founders of business empires are not “captains of industry,” public benefactors who deserve wealth and adulation. Many of them are indeed people of vision, but none could have actualized their visions without laborers, investors, a receptive society, and a good deal of luck.5
More than anything, the superrich are looking for a magic bullet. They ask, “How can we get the needy to feel good about their lives when, by any objective measure, they should feel miserable?” If the superrich could find the answer, they could lay claim to the sweetest of sweet spots. It would amount to no less than a license to steal. Amazingly, they’re making headway. They use a trick known as deflection.
Deflection means selling people a pathway to happiness without improving their standard of living. It’s done at their workplaces. It begins with counseling that acknowledges grievances — low pay, a dead-end job, disrespectful treatment, harassment by superiors. It offers skills training and promises a future of equitable treatment, personal growth, accomplishment, inclusion, and respect. The promises are supposedly kept through a series of team building sessions, an interminable kind of group therapy. Yes, it’s a deception, but sometimes deceptions work.6
I marvel that the superrich have convinced anyone that adding 1,000 dollars or euros or yuans to a mountain of billions is morally more justifiable than putting it in the pockets of people who struggle for a living. How damnable it is to even put that argument. How damnable it is to believe it! I’d go so far as to say that the appalling number of twisted governments in the world owe their existence to this moral blindness.
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1There are 195 countries in the world. Each year, the Economist Democracy Index labels the type of political regime in 167 of them. (It classifies 28 countries as “microstates” and omits them from its surveys.) 59 of the 167 are labeled as autocratic.
274 of the world’s countries are democracies. Of these, 24 are “full democracies” and 50 are “flawed democracies.” See the Economist Democracy Index for definitions of these terms.
334 of the world’s countries are hybrid governments. That means 93 governments are either autocracies or moving toward autocracy. The total will be 94 if Donald Trump is elected this fall.
4236 billionaires have signed with The Giving Pledge, promising to give at least half their wealth to charity. Do I think better of them for making this pledge? No, they aren’t trustworthy. Many of them will not keep the pledge, and surely only a fraction will keep it while alive. Only consider that half of, say, 50 billion is 25 billion. Half an obscene sum is still an obscene sum. What’s needed is a yearly wealth tax that’s more than a token amount.
5Perhaps the worst consequence of oligarchic propaganda is that its veneer of bullshit hides a country’s real story from its citizens. Thus the need for reform and the oligarchy itself are seldom acknowledged.
6I almost laughed as I wrote this sentence. In America, deceptions work quite well. People will actually line up to buy bibles with Satan’s signature.
The Scratching Post 