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[sebastian_dangerfield]

Please think about what you're saying. The issue you're trying to put your finger on is a necessary attribute of government, not a peculiar aspect of democracy. Government is a tool to, among other things, impose a social order and redistribute. Throughout history, most governments have redistributed from the bottom to the top. In other words, exploitation. Rich people tend not to see any problem with this. When poor people want to have an equal say, rich people conjure up just-so stories, like you are now, to explain that it won't work. Crucially, these just-so stories mask the redistributive piece, and make things sound like a mechanical problem that just exists in nature. "if you create a system where people vote themselves benefits, they'll do so until the system collapses." Really? Where has that happened? The system collapsing, I mean. Just to take a popular counterexample, look at the Nordic countries, where the people have voted for social benefits much richer than you see in this country. Denmark, for example, hasn't collapsed.

I think all government has authoritarian tendencies within it. For this reason, I think it's healthy to always distrust it. And be thoroughly suspicious of those who seek to work in politics.

On point two, we are not Norway. Or Denmark, or Sweden.

It's freakishly odd to me that you can sound off here *all the time* about how the political system doesn't serve ordinary people, causing them to lose jobs and vote for Trump and all sorts of other horribles, and then give this explanation of how giving ordinary people more political power can't work. Dude, it's almost like the noblesse oblige approach that you are advocating right now doesn't actually work. News flash: Affluent suburbs have well-paved roads and good schools, and poor suburbs don't. But you keep worrying about how democracy will collapse if we trying to treat people more equally.

Again, it's a balancing act. You can only give the people so much power. It has to be checked or men will simply vote for policies that aid themselves until the thing craters. Tragedy of the Commons at the voting booth. Applies to the rich, the poor, the middle... literally everyone. Equally.

Right. I understand that you agree on a fundamental level that libertarianism is profoundly misguided, but because you are rolling out the libertarian claptrap and there is no one else here to defend it, I'm letting you have it. Thanks for playing.

I'm highlighting the good and bad of the ideology.

What were Rockefeller Republicans are today's affluent Democrats, and when they vote for higher taxes -- which they often do -- they are in fact hurting their bottom line. You're getting the Stupid Talking Point (tm) wrong -- the hypocrisy charge against them is not that they won't vote against economic self-interest, which they do, it's that they are somehow not to be taken seriously because they don't give up all their wealth like St Francis of Assisi.

I'd say half of the people I know are affluent Democrats, or Republican Hillary voters (there are a lot of those). They didn't vote against self-interest. They voted, and generally vote, for continuity and predictability. They vote for what they think will keep the stock market rolling. They're as selfish as the GOP voters. These people long ago calculated that stock markets tend to do better in Democratic administrations (they do), and that whatever little increase they see in taxes will be eclipsed by gains.

You can use words however you like, but if you want to use them to communicate with other people then it helps to use meanings that other people use too. This version of "authoritarian" that you've hatched has little or nothing to do with the way that other people understand the word, and also is so broad as to be meaningless. Anyone who has every worked in a government, or a company with more than one employee, or a non-profit, or who has been a part of organized religion, or youth sports -- they're all "authoritarians" in your book. If that's how you're writing your book, I don't think I want to read it.

If you're prosthelytizing, you've got some authoritarian stuff going on upstairs.

More interesting question here, but I think that self-interest trumps a desire to control other people's behavior as a relative explanation for most political behavior -- but for various reasons, people want to justify their positions based on abstract principles, not self-interest, so they often dress up the former as the latter.

In this basket, one will find more limousine liberals and conservative republicans than any other stripe of voter.

Do you have a good example of someone acting in politics out of a desire to control other people's behavior that is not also motivated by self-interest?

Ralph Nader.

You fetishize the creative destruction of a recession all the time without ever explaining why it would be good for everyone to see more bankruptcies and monetary loss. The system clears out dead weight all the time. What happens in a financial crisis is that good stuff gets burned down too. How does a recession give a little guy a chance?

He can compete. He's not blown out by larger competitors before he can even get a start. The smart little guy who bet on the collapse and avoided exposure to the risks does even better. He gets asymmetrical returns picking up assets at next to nothing.

I understand where the populism comes from. It would have been worse if we'd had a big recession. See, e.g., the 1930s.

Again, it's a balancing act. We balanced nothing. Now we have populism.