All Modern Governments are “Broken Window” Economics

As citizens awake to the disaster that democracy inevitably becomes in its later stages, they are starting to realize that their governments commited mortgage fraud against them: borrowed the money through taxation, reverse mortgaged through debt, borrowed against that, and now the bill will come due in a big hairy way.

Others have said this better, but democracy operates well until it becomes facilitative. At first, there is a shared goal, and the money, time, energy, and concentration go toward that. Eventually, the goal dissolves or becomes unclear, and you get a facilitative society.

Societies of these natures resemble committees. People come forward with complaints and the committee addresses each with a new law, program, or fund. The special interests quickly dominate and the needs of the functional majority are replaced by the dysfunctional niche communities demanding subsidies.

Once the voters can vote themselves money at the expense of others, democracy becomes a mean place. There is no drug more tempting than Other People’s Money (OP(iu)M). Not only does it allow for free stuff, but for revenge against those who are either more successful or simply happy and not concerned with the drama.

This can go on for many decades because at first, the nibble is small. At some point however the spending of OPM becomes the major focus of society, and it spends itself into debt while anyone who can afford to do so exits. The whole world is dotted with people escaping the tax regimes of the West and Japan.

Late Stage Democracy societies quickly start to resemble socialist ones simply because people are voting for free stuff paid for by others. In theory, socialism designates the workers own the means of production, but in reality that indicates the government owns everything and pays out dividends to the workers.

Within democracy, you get a kind of socialism where the government simply taxes everything productive and hands it over to the rabble, who insist that whatever succeeds is the source of their own victimization. Then government borrows to afford the disaster.

In this way, its economics resemble broken window economics:

The broken window theory states that a broken window adds value to the economy because a replacement must be purchased and that puts money into the economy. Under this type of theory, politicians “create jobs” with regulation and welfare money grows the economy. It is the basis of our new hybrid of socialism and capitalism that relies on re-financialized debt, or the selling of obligations as if they were of positive value.

This creates the Keynesian circular Ponzi scheme (KcPs) which through constant stimulus or “pump priming” makes the economy centrally controlled by government, creating a society that spends three-quarters of its wealth on benefits payments.

Like most illusions and scams, this one starts out strong, like it did during its rebirth in the O’Clinton years (a continuation of O’Carter after Reagan, much as O’Bama was a continuation of it after Bush II). It seems to soar but at some point drag takes over and the plane crashes in fire, amputation, and disembowelment.

The screams will echo across history. The voters will cry out, “How could the politicians do this to us?” They did not; you did it to yourselves, or more accurately, you allowed people among you who dominated the electorate and demanded it despite its historical record of making equal misery.