Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption (opens in new tab)

It's easy to argue we don't really live in a democracy. Plenty of laws and regulations go against the majority to favour a few powerful entities (think about copyright laws, healthcare in the US).

That said, the alternative to democracy is not necessary the increasingly authoritarian governments we see around the world. If we gave more power and freedom to the individual and less to the state, we could have more freedom without democracy.

Democracy after all is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority. Why not just have any entity controlling the lives of others?

Great read. The consumption angle is one I'd never seen before, but very persuasive.

> This framework clarifies a particular hypocrisy in contemporary British politics. The generation that has used its demographic weight to consume the surplus of current producers through triple-locked pensions, healthcare spending that rises inexorably with age, and property wealth accumulated behind exclusionary planning regimes, is the same generation that now drives the populist right’s fixation on migration. Yet the migrant, whatever burden they may place on public services, consumes a fraction of what the pensioner consumes in annual transfers. The young worker paying 40-50% of their income in tax, rent, and student loans is not being impoverished by the asylum seeker or migrant worker as much as they are being disadvantaged by the pensioner who owns their rented flat, by the planning regime that prevents new construction, by the landlord interest that captures housing benefit, and by the financial sector that inflates asset prices while starving productive enterprise of capital.

The only solution to this underlying cause is obvious and one I have been advocating for years now. Votes must be weighted by age, with the minimum voting age getting the maximum weight, down to maybe 20% (exact number is up for calculation) for the oldest person in the country. Otherwise, there is no escaping this problem. The older one gets, the more one is disincentivized to vote for long-term interests for the good of. The youth is the future, and policies are to be for the future.

For what it's worth, I'm nowhere near the minimum voting age, so this isn't a teenager saying "teenagers deserve all the rights". It's an inevitability. I've generally voted against personal interests and for the common good, but the huge majority of people are simply incapable of doing so. Hence if a group whose interest is aligned purely with short-term status-quo maintenance and hoarding becomes too large, there's no recourse. Which is where Europe is at.

There is of course one other solution, which is war. This temporarily resets the ability of many to vote for the common good rather than pure self-interest. This is naturally the "solution" that will be implemented, though unfortunately technology has advanced to such a stage that there's unlikely to be such an "after" period.

I’ve had some version of the consumer and producer problem in my head for a while and this is a good articulation of it. I would use Brazil and Venezuela as examples of it where there is a democracy that struggles to keep up with the majorities consumption desires vs its producer ability. Venezuela has since capitulated and unbelievably since I first thought about it been invaded.

Is this just all rent seekers? Is it a tipping point of wealth distribution and economic mobility? Is there a limit to how much imbalance a democracy can handle? Where the floor is on social services?

Enjoyed the essay for kicking up some thoughts.

A libertarian's authoritarian wet-dream. The post assumes that producers and consumers are disjoint i.e. one is either a consumer, or one is a producer. There's no acknowledgement that it's possible to produce in one context and consume in another, or that last year one produced and this year one consumed. It reeks of a religious argument - the saved and the damned. Even the admission that consumers (freeloaders?) will always exist and need to be treated with dignity smells of an annoying paternalism.