Andrew Spannaus — European Union’s Democracy Dilemma

The European elites want the European Union as a means for controlling the Continent’s economies, but that often requires overriding the popular will of nation states, a dilemma for “democracy,” explains Andrew Spannaus.

Capitalism and democracy are antithetical, since capitalism entails elite control while democracy takes the interests of all into account.

The case of Ireland shows the preferred method of European institutions for consolidating E.U. authority. First a goal is set, and then the method is chosen to meet it. If the most influential European politicians agree, the consent of the governed becomes merely an annoying detail to get around however possible....

The preferred method for moving forward with European integration raises serious questions. If the only way to create a United States of Europe is to avoid consulting the people, why should the goal even be pursued? The response often heard is based on circular reasoning: Europe needs to be built in order to meet the needs of the people, then the people will understand why it’s so important.…

The decision is taken chiefly on the basis of elite interests assuming that elites know best and what is good for them will make everyone's life better. If not, those left out did not try hard enough to make it work for them.

Consortium News
European Union’s Democracy Dilemma
Andrew Spannaus

Chris Dillow — Elites or people?

Humanity doesn't have a resource problem; it has a management problem. Who most qualified to manage these resources, the people or the experts? What is the optimal system to balance these factors? Representative democracy was supposed to provide checks and balances. Has it?

These are some of the issues involving the balance of technocracy and democracy, elitism and populism. These issues are now coming to the fore politically as inequality rises and the social fabric frays.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Elites or people?
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

John Chuckman — Breakdown of the Clinton Money Machine

As troubling as Donald Trump’s election may be, it carries greater hope for some positive good than the alternative of Hillary Clinton, who represented a corrupt, money-churning machine, writes John Chuckman.

Nothing is going to change for the better more than temporarily without getting the money out of politics, ending lobbying, and locking the revolving door.

Exposing the problem is insufficient. It must be solved and after the Citizens United decision, this will take a constitutional amendment in the US.

Other countries face similar challenges.

The fundamental problems globally are elitism — the cronyism to which elitism leads and corruption that the elite legalizes.

These issues will either be solved peacefully or there will be revolutions.

Consortium News
Breakdown of the Clinton Money Machine

John Chuckman, former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company

Favorite tidbit:

In hindsight, it might be just as well that Sanders was cheated out of the nomination. He proved a weak individual in the end, giving in to just the forces that he had claimed to oppose and leaving his enthusiastic followers completely let down. There he was, out on the hustings, supporting everything he ever opposed as personified in Hillary Clinton. Men of that nature do not stand up well to Generals and Admirals and the heads of massive corporations, a quality which I do think we have some right to expect Trump to display.

Greg Mankiw — The Triumph of the Less Educated

The elite response.

Greg Mankiw'w Blog
The Triumph of the Less Educated

Greg Mankiw | Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University

Why Are Elites Out of Touch? They Think Anyone Who Disagrees with Them Is Crazy

The experts told us that Brexit will not happen. It cannot happen. The consequences will be too severe. The economic fallout too great to even imagine. Yet, the unthinkable became a reality: The people of Britain voted "Leave,” against the experts' advice. How could this be? Did they not hear the experts' warnings? What went wrong?

Baffled, the experts searched for an answer. And they found one: the people went mad. They became mad from their anger at globalization. Globalization promised them riches, instead it made some of them unemployed. Or they became mad because of fear—fear from immigration and foreign people. Whatever the reason they went mad, the experts are sure of one thing: the fault is not with them. They gave sound advice. Their arguments were relevant. The fault is with the populace, not the leaders.

A few examples are in order. First, an article published in Foreign Policy with the title: "It's Time for the Elites to Rise up Against the Ignorant Masses." The writer claims the world is divided not between right and left, but between the sane and the angry. And the latter are angry simple because they are ignorant.…

The diagnosis is correct — elite entitlement versus the rule of the rabble. His therapy, not so much — basically change the propaganda rather than address the actual issues that underlie.

The National Interest
Why Are Elites Out of Touch? They Think Anyone Who Disagrees with Them Is Crazy

Nitzan David Foucks, Israeli writer and speaker on foreign policy and geopolitics

Fred Block — Karl Polanyi and twenty-first century socialism

Polanyi’s views were the exact opposite of his contemporary, Joseph Schumpeter, who famously defined democracy as giving people a choice over which elite group would rule over them.…

In contrast to the Marxist tradition, Polanyi defined socialism in terms of the extension of democracy into the economic realm. He wrote: “Socialism is, essentially the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” Buried in this brief definition are a series of ideas that could be useful for building an alternative to the current dysfunctional global economy.…

And that extension also means abandoning the free market idea that the workings of the economy should be off-limits to democratic decision making. Polanyi’s argument was that free market advocates were always disingenuous in their arguments in favor of laissez-faire. His view was that imposing free markets on society always required extensive state coercion. That was what he was getting at with the fictitious commodities; they do not just emerge naturally; they have to be created every day through the exercise of governmental powers. Under laissez-faire, these government powers are used to enhance the power and wealth of the ownership class.…

Polanyi was hardly naïve. He recognized that those with wealth would resist this deepening and extension of democracy just as propertied elites had often resisted the expansion of suffrage and other democratic rights. Moreover, he was contemptuous of those who imagined that the coming of socialism was somehow preordained or inevitable. He believed that building socialism required an organized socialist movement that was able to create institutions of popular democracy through which people could learn how society works and become empowered citizens.…

Out of paradigm with MMT, but many useful social and political insights about an incremental transition from oligarchic capitalism to democratic socialism.

Open Democracy
Karl Polanyi and twenty-first century socialism

Fred Block

Eric Schliesser — Trump Panic; On "the Breakdown of Trust between Elites and Base..."

Elites don't like democracy because it threatens the rule of the few, nor do conservatives trust it because it threatens rule of the rabble. These fears are now converging with the rise of populism.

This is another paradox of liberalism. Economic liberalism is incompatible with social and political liberalism.

Digressions&Impressions
Trump Panic; On "the Breakdown of Trust between Elites and Base..."
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Mark Thoma — 'Economic Policy Splits Democrats'

Third Way-New Democrat-Establishment-Clintonites versus Progressives uniting behind Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren aka elitism versus populism.

Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are fracturing.

So, should I adopt a message I don't think is true because it sells with independents who have been swayed by Very Serious People, or should I say what I believe and try to convince people they are barking up the wrong tree? (For the most part anyway, I believe both the technological/globalization and institutional/unfairness explanations have validity -- but how do workers capture the gains Third Way wants to create through growth and wealth creation without the bargaining power they have lost over time with the decline in unionization, threats of offshoring, etc.? That's the bigger problem.) It is unfair when, say, economic or political power redirects income away from those who created it to those who did not (I am using the normative equity principle that each person has a right to keep what he or she produces, to reap what they have sowed, and I have little doubt that workers have been paid less than their productivity, and those at the top more. That's unfair, and redirecting income -- redistributing if you will -- to those who actually earned it is not harmful. It is just, and it creates the correct economic incentives). Wealth creation/growth has not been the biggest problem over the last four decades (i.e. since inequality started to increase), it is how the gains have been distributed. I'd rather convince people of the truth that more growth and more wealth creation won't solve the problem if we don't address workers' bargaining power at the same time than gain their support by patronizing their views. In the meantime redistributing income from those who didn't earn it to those who did can serve as a temporary solution until we get the more fundamental underlying problems fixed (e.g. level the playing field on bargaining power between workers and firms).….

The answer is not dealing with the issue because it is "unpopular"(owing to elite propaganda) but through explanation.

Maybe politicians have to tell people what they want to hear, I'll let them figure that out, but I will continue to call it as I see it even if "independents and moderate voters are more anxious than they are angry about these changes." That won't change if we play into those anxieties instead of explaining why new approaches are needed, and explaining how they will benefit from a system that does a better job of rewarding hard work instead of ownership, connections, and power.

It's HRC's election to lose at this point. If she wins (and likely serves two terms), the Democratic Party should be toast by then, if the whole world is not toasted by nuclear war in the meantime.

Economist's View
'Economic Policy Splits Democrats'
Mark Thoma | Professor of Economics, University of Oregon

The Arthurian — "No government in history has been known to evade this pattern."

"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy." — Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

The New Arthurian Economics
"No government in history has been known to evade this pattern."
The Arthurian

Coolidge and Hayek on conservatism

The Calvin Coolindge test to determine whether one is conservative (like Cal) or liberal.

Balkinization
An Ideological Test
Gerard N. Magliocca

Hayek's take on it by Corey Robin

Balkinization
From Coolidge to Hayek

Frank Pasquale

There's a simpler test. Does one think, feel and behave in accordance with the principle, Some are better than others and deserve privilege, or the principle that all are created equal and deserve to be treated as equals. 

Lynn Stuart Parramore — 'A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility': Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America

David Graeber talks about his new book, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, and shows how America was not founded as a democracy, but as an anti-democracy.

LP: You note that democracy was contested during America's founding. Who were the proponents of democracy and how did they manifest their views?

DG: Actually, there were almost none. In the writings of the patriots and leaders of the revolution, word "democracy" was used almost interchangeably with "anarchy" or even "mob rule." Everyone opposed it. By democracy, they meant, either rule through popular assemblies like in ancient Greece -- which they saw a little during the big mobilizations they called out during the revolution -- or by extension, any system where ordinary people held the power of governance themselves. So it wasn't really contested among the political classes. They were uniformly opposed to it. You just have to read the opening remarks of the constitutional convention of 1789: it begins, 'we have a problem. There's far too much democracy in this country. State constitutions cannot contain it. We need to set up something stronger.'

In the course of the interview he sums up the major economic problem today.

As for financialization, well, we tend to talk about that as if it's all very abstract. More and more profits are derived not from making or selling anything, but pure speculation, as if these Wall Street types have figured out a way to whisk wealth into being simply by saying that it's there. In fact what it really means is that financial interests collude with government — which they've basically completely bought out, at this point — to enforce policies that reduce more and more Americans into debt. The reason it's so anti-democratic is that it changes the role of government itself, which is increasingly becoming merely the legal cover and muscle behind debt and rent extraction, for a very small group of the super-wealthy who play by a completely different set of rules. This in turn changes ordinary Americans' basic perceptions of their relation to government and other key institutions of our society.

Alternet
'A Kaleidoscopic Sense of Possibility': Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America
Lynn Stuart Parramore

Paul Craig Roberts — Unplugging Americans From The Matrix

Blistering indictment based on Ron Unz's articles in The American Conservative.

Read it at CounterPoint
Unplugging Americans From The Matrix
Paul Craig Roberts | former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the REagan Administration and co-founder of Reaganomics
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)