Democracy Doesn’t Scale
24th April 2013
Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, tells you some inconvenient truth.
Many errors are made by assuming that things scale linearly when they don’t. For example, if you triple your speed on the highway (from 35 mph to 105 mph), you probably won’t triple the mileage you cover in an hour. You’ll likely spend plenty of time parked on the shoulder, explaining to a police officer why you were driving so fast.
One of the most frequent and unfortunate failures to understand that things don’t always scale linearly involves democracy. Too many people assume that what holds true for their book club or homeowners association holds true for democratic polities of millions of people.
That last may not be a good example — most homeowner’s associations are as rigidly fascist in their outlook as the Congressional Black Caucus. But I take his point.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington might be called “the People’s House,” but in reality, I am no more welcome into the inner chambers of that building than I am welcome into the boardroom of IBM or into the office of the CEO of Disney. And what’s true for me is true for 99.99999 percent of other Americans.
Actually, being an economics professor, he’s likely far more welcome there than would be, say, a truck driver or a plumber. The Crust don’t like to rub elbows with proles, after all.