The Forum > Article Comments > Does Australia have a 'political crisis'? > Comments
Does Australia have a 'political crisis'? : Comments
By Don Aitkin, published 3/2/2015One cause is that our politics is almost completely adversarial, and another is that the electorate does not understand the realities of our political economy. We have become too used to annually increasing wealth.
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I think the problem with your article is that it assumes that society is a decision-making entity, and that government is a kind of device by which society decides what's best for society. These assumptions are, at best, factually dubious.
Treating "society" as a decision-making entity is problematic if it doesn't define who are the individuals who comprise this alleged decision-making entity. And it ignores the fact that, while they may have certain interests in common which can be furthered in a mutually beneficial way, they also can and do have interests in conflict which can be settled in a zero-sum antagonistic way: hence all species of statism especially socialism.
The idea that government is society's consensual decision-making device ignores the above conflict of interest. It also ignores the fact that governments do not originate as general good-optimising mechanisms, but as the private property of coercive monopolist property-expropriators - kings. The addition of democratic mechanisms doesn't change this fundamentally coercive and property-expropriating defining characteristic of governments. In fact, government is overwhelmingly not engaged in furthering interests which all 'society' have in common, but in enabling some to live at the expense of others, based on legalised force, threats and deceptive conduct.
Once we correct for the factual errors in the usual assumptions about government, we would expect to see that democratic politics is an anti-social process by which the politicians foment and facilitate legalised unprincipled plunder by the people of their neighbours, or any group they can demonise. We would expect to see an adversary process by which political entrepreneurs provoke conflicts between groups in society, which the state then enters to settle in its own favour, and that of whatever political favourites the politicians are siding with.
Now that's got explaining power, hasn't it?
I think looking to see why politicians don't exert "leadership" at their own personal cost to act in a principled way for the common good is a vain exercise, because it's based on a fundamentally mistaken assumption about what government is.