The Cost of Democracy

Most Western liberal democracies are facing an inflection point right now - if you haven’t noticed. They face the question that has been chugging along unrelentingly in recent decades but only now has it arrived at its stop and awaits for its passengers to board. Generally, it goes like this: Do you believe that your vote really matters? And - to go one step further: Can you vote your way out of the crises that your country faces? By crises I mean: unfettered and unaccounted government spending, the bureaucratisation of the state and traditional values being swept under the rug in the face of “progress”.

This dilemma isn’t anything new. Scholars of age-old reputation have come to terms with this before. Plato spoke:

“Democracy passes into despotism.” 

Churchill more humorously noted that: 

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” 

All astute observations indeed. 

Alas, the decline of the west has been sad to watch, not least due to the reasons aforementioned. More so, the dissatisfactory results that ‘democracy’ has given us. The Conservative party in Britain embodied this perfectly during their 14 years of rule. You’d think that being  a “Conservative party” they’d actually act conservatively. Not so. When the Tories assumed office back in 2010, a different age entirely, public sector net debt as a percentage of GDP was around 70%. By the end of their tenure that was at about 98%. From a ‘Conservative’ government. 

Looking across the pond to our “closest allies”, as Keir Starmer puts it, America has become engulfed in an age of similar partisan bi-partisan politics in which officials running against each other for elected office are done so on the back of shared promises. Contemporary Republican candidate promises go like: “I’ll do this (spend more money), this (spend more money)  and this (spend more money)”. In response, the Democrat candidate goes: “Well he doesn’t know what he’s doing ‘cus I’ll do this (spend even more money), this (spend even more money) and this (spend even more money).” It’s the same thing over and over again. It’s not the tyranny of the minority - or even the tyranny of the majority. It’s the tyranny of the conformers who, dare they say anything out of the norm’, they’ll suffer at the polls, time after time. And then, so does the average American, not knowingly of course. 

For all of the positives of democracy, which there are definitely some, it is impossible to sanely espouse that it guarantees good solid reliable governance. Decade after decade of American decline has proven that, as has Canada, as has the UK, France, Germany etc. It’s important to remember that allowing residents to dictate a country's leader/leaders will almost always result in the candidate who promised ‘more’ victory.

In response to the decline in the Western world, many of the world’s richest people seem to be flocking to places like the United Arab Emirates, far from their now debt-inundated and demographically disparaged homelands. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of countries nearby are flocking westward. The ol’ switcheroo.

The UAE specifically is politically undemocratic; socially stringent but economically peerlessly liberal, with some of the lowest tax rates anywhere. But, these are the types of places that people will continue to move to unless the West doesn’t sort itself out. The crime rates are lower, energy is far cheaper (obviously) and immigration records are nowhere near the likes of Western Europe. Unlike Western Europe of course, where the recent mass power-outage that ensued across Portugal, Spain and parts of France left millions of families without a way to heat their homes or light them, the UAE is going all-in on economic growth through energy production. So while the Middle-East drills into its oil reserves, the West drills itself further into its own hole of self-desecration. 

Yet, you can’t vote out the leader in the UAE: Mohamed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. Sure, there’s not really free speech while the punishment for any crime - including homosexuality - is deucedly high. With that said (not to justify the previous cases), this year's projected GDP growth for the UAE is nearly a staggering 5 percent while the US’s is less than 2%; the UK’s is just under 1%; France’s is around 1% and Germany’s economy is even projected to shrink by the IMF’s calculations by 0.1%. 

The UAE’s national debt meanwhile, sits at a modest $166.8 billion representing just 32.4% of GDP. The US of A’s? $36.2 trillion: 101.2% of GDP. The UK? $3.62 trillion: 97.5% of GDP. Germany? $3.1 trillion: 64.3% of GDP. You get the gist: democracy seems to be awful bad at handling economic matters…that is if the democratic institutions develop a culture of promising more and more (which they have). Admittedly, the UAE is just one country along with a select few other undemocratic states that seem to have things relatively under control. They know their beliefs and they know their mission; they are certainly a minority in the world of authoritarian states. But they at least show that it’s possible for economic success without democracy. The question is: can it last? 

We’ll see. 

As for the West, for a while at least, democracy did offer real differences between candidates gunning for public office. But that was when people actually voted because they cared about the issues and matters at hand. More pertinently, they believed that their voice; their vote - mattered. At the 1950 UK general election, turnout was 83%. At last year's election it was just under 60%. The current government in the UK has one of  the lowest vote shares in UK history yet it occupies one of the largest parliamentary majorities. Though, you can’t blame voters for not turning up to the polls; no matter who was in government over the past four or five decades, the fundamental issues of the country were never solved. 

Unfortunately, people don’t need to care about their culture anymore. ‘Cus when your government guarantees a house, a car and whatever else - your needs are taken care of and you can kick back and relax. Hence, why vote at all?

One of the best aphorisms on the state of the USA, although can be extrapolated into much of Western countries, comes from Peter Schiff:

“America was founded by rugged individuals who created government to secure their rights and leave them alone. Americans today want government to violate other people's rights, steal their stuff, and give it to them. The home of the free has become the land of the freeloader.” 

Too true.