David McElroy

If you need more evidence that people’s lack of ability to reason is part of why majoritarian systems break down, here’s some more evidence.

I’ve written a couple of times recently about the sales tax that my suburb’s City Council is about to shove down our throats, even though 72 percent of voters said “No!” to a property tax increase last year.

One of the popular ways to sell a sales tax increase is to tell people it’s “just a penny.” I mean, nobody worries about a penny here or there, right? Take a look at this comment left by a woman on a local newspaper’s website:

“I don’t have a problem with the increase. IF people could do math…eh hemm..like when tipping at a restaurant…they would realize it’s ONLY 1 cents on a dollar that THEY choose to spend. It’s not like it’s 100s or 1000s of dollars like when they were trying to raise our property tax.”

This woman is apparently too ignorant to realize that pennies add up to millions of dollars. The increase (which is a whopping 50 percent hike from the city’s previous sales tax) is expected to raise about $5 million a year. That’s a lot of pennies.

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Have you noticed that politics is becoming more like television? There was a day — long before we were born — when politics was about ideas. Well … ideas, money and power. But at least there were real ideas involved back when politics was communicated solely through spoken or written words.

Today, politics is all a show. But it’s not just a spectator thing. It’s like a giant game show. With the help of the media, politics has become an elaborate version of the old game show, “Let’s Make a Deal.”

You all know how the game is played. Hundreds of people dress in ridiculous costumes, hoping for the chance to trade their dignity for unknown riches — just like those of us who line up like Dorothy and her pals asking the Wizard of Oz for gifts. But that’s mixing metaphors. Let’s look at the ways in which democracy is like “Let’s Make a Deal.”

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It’s easy to assume that life is always going to go on pretty much the way it does right now. I’m sure the people of Rome thought their empire would last forever. The folks of the Ottoman Empire felt the same way. As did the Greeks and Egyptians and Mayans. What do they all have in common? They all eventually fell. The same fate awaits every powerful nation in time.

Empires don’t fall quickly. We have short attention spans. We think that if something doesn’t happen in days, it’s not happening. The truth is that changes happen slowly — over years, decades and even centuries. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the U.S. “empire” to crumble, but the warning signs are all around. I don’t know how long it’s going to take before the European welfare states — which is the first cousin of our own “mixed economy” — will take to fall.

I’m not a psychic, and I’m not going to make predictions that I don’t believe anyone can reasonably make. I can’t tell you exactly what the end game is going to look like. But what I can tell you is that it’s coming. It might be triggered by a financial panic and collapse soon. It might be that governments and central banks are able to prop up the whole rotting system a bit longer. But it’s coming down.

When it comes down, it won’t be pretty. When it happens, what’s going on in London will look like tea and cake with the queen by comparison. (See more pictures as it’s spreading to other parts of the country.) Think now about how you’re going to protect yourself and your family.