Democracy’s Perennial Weakness The reckoning we face. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democracys-perennial-weakness/

The Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill managed to squeak by the typical legislative partisan road-blocks and sand traps. Like all legislation in democracies, the bill is not perfect, nor does it satisfy everyone. But just extending Donald Trump’s 2017 tax reform no doubt pleases most voters and taxpayers who dodged a $4 trillion tax increase next year. The Dems, of course, have been flogging their usual suspect clichés about “gutting Medicaid” and other social welfare programs just to keep the “rich” from “paying their fair share,” even though the U.S. already has the most progressive income tax among developed economies.

This doesn’t mean, however, that many problems–– for example, with our metastasizing debt, deficits, and expansionary Rube Goldberg redistribution machines––don’t exist. On all counts we are facing, sooner than most voters realize, a reckoning that economist Veronique de Rugy recently catalogued, and which will require painful sacrifices. Unfortunately, as The Wall Street Journal describes this “crisis of the welfare state,” is “fiscally unaffordable but politically unreformable.”

But these problems are not just caused by office-seekers doling out goodies to voters in exchange for their votes or campaign donations. Rather, ever since democracy was born 2500 years ago, it has reflected the novel but problematic structures necessary for empowering the ordinary, free citizens to participate in holding offices and speaking publicly. Both freedoms are hostage to the eternal, tragic flaws of human nature and its passions and interests.