The Failure of the Free Market and Democracy by Daniel Ritter

Author:Daniel Ritter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

HORSES FOR COURSES

Perhaps more convincing is the empirical link between political systems and the underlying technological and economic reality of the times. If we can’t justify democracy on theoretical or moral grounds, perhaps the fact that it has worked to deliver the greatest increase in living standards in human history is sufficient. If there is no rational solution to the problem of decision-making by society, the next best hope might be to find the system that demonstrably works best in practice. That may be so, but what happens when this ceases to be the case, as in the last few decades? We will return to this question.

In prehistoric times man was a hunter-gatherer. Gradually, it made sense to join together in groups for protection and more effective hunting. This economic mode went hand in hand with the birth of tribal societies. Without delving too deeply into sociology or anthropology, there is a Marxian sense in which we can explain the organisation of society according to what best serves its economic, technological and security model at the time.

Similarly, as man evolved and learned to cultivate the earth and breed and control certain animal species, the notion of land ownership within clear boundaries gave birth to feudalism – society based on ownership by landowners or rentiers, tenant farmers and serfs around city states, followed by nations and empires. This coincided with the rise of organised religions, such as Christianity, which provided legitimacy to the rule of the king or emperor at the top of the pyramid, anchoring the ruler’s political power and the use of force. To make it in feudal society, one had to be either a landowner or rise through the ranks of the church or the army.

Western religion legitimised only the family unit and monogamous sex in order to clearly delineate ownership of land and wealth and to facilitate its orderly and efficient transmission from one generation to the next. One can be forgiven for thinking that if Christ did not exist, he would have had to be invented anyway. Indeed, it is the rigidity and simplicity of this structure that gave the West a leg up in transforming essentially agricultural wealth into the next phase of the economy, based on commerce and industry, and, eventually, finance.

There is of course no sharp frontier in time separating one social system from the next. Political assemblies providing checks and balances on the power of the leader came into existence during feudal times in Europe, and democracy was invented as far back as ancient Greece.

In Greece’s ‘golden age’ (starting around the fifth century BC), the political units were cities such as Athens, where the citizens were sufficiently few and local that the assembly could be attended by all of them. This was direct democracy in action rather than representative government through elections. However even this system did not insulate Athens from capture by certain interests. It has been estimated that only 3,000 or so people actively participated in politics. Of this group,

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