How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law

[maradydd]

So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:

How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some

Comments

[xthread]

Rothbard's basic idea that the two fundamental classes are those who profit from the political system and those who pay for it

Are you making the argument that plutocrats derive their wealth from the labor of the peasants? I have a hard time reconciling that with two observed realities -

• In the US, while the wealthy may not pay as steeply progressive income tax as some would like, they do, as a population, pay a larger fraction of income taxes than the fraction of overall GDP that they receive as income. I would think for the wealthy to be living on the backs of the poor, that would imply that the poor are paying much more of their incomes than the wealthy (which is false in the aggregate, even when it is true in the particular) or that the poor's income is being even more directly transferred to the wealthy.
  
• The point of most concern to the public at the moment seems to be unemployment, that is to say, that too many people in the middle and working classes aren't earning money at all; precisely how do you then conclude that the well-to-do are living off of the spoils of their labors when they aren't laboring?

Note - wrt the second point, there, I can imagine some chains of reasoning that could be used to support that argument, but I have no idea which, if any, of them you subscribe to, and I'd rather prefer not to put words in your mouth.

[maradydd]

I don't want to put words in whswhs's mouth either, but the way I read it is that there are two classes of people: those who regard the political system (whatever it might happen to be at the time) as a means of determining the will of the people (well, in many modern cases anyway) and effecting policy, and those who regard it as a vehicle for making a buck. These correspond to honest actors and cheaters/"prudent predators" in a game-theoretic representation.

There can of course be honest plutocrats and prudent-predator peasants; the latter is where the notion of "welfare queens" comes from. But, critically, the divide is not merely between haves and have-nots, but rather between actors based on their willingness to play by the same rules as everyone else.

N.B.: this falls out of some observations you've probably heard me make about how quite a lot of Belgian policies are constructed so as to make cheating less practical than playing by the rules. We can't count on everyone to be rational actors, but from my observations I'd argue that prudent predators have to analyze a system as rationally as they can in order to determine how they can realise short-term profits from it.

[xthread]

Huh.. That sounds like a much more useful construction than the Rothbard quote.

I would argue that one of the great objectives of representative democracy is to channel the excesses of the pursuit of ambition to the benefit of the common good. Certainly that's the sense I've always gotten from Madison - the point is not to strive to employ Angels, but to structure Governance so that we get good outcomes from imperfect, greedy, lazy, dishonest people. That is to say, the sort we have on offer already.
I think of your examples of Belgian policies that tilt the cost-benefit curve of cheating to be precisely examples of that principle - I don't want to suppress humans chasing self-interest, I want to maximize both their own and the collective benefit from their chase. So when I think about policy analysis, my framing paragraph tends to be 'Posit an opportunistic, dishonest actor..'