The birthplace of ancient democracy is now offering us a salutary lesson on the perils of modern democracy.
The vote last week in Greece rejecting austerity in itself explains why austerity has been so bluntly thrust upon it.
This is because austerity isn't a policy or choice that you can reject or accept; rather, it is a consequence of bad policy and bad choices--in the case of Greece, the decision of its citizens, encouraged by its corrupt political elites, to live beyond their means.
Everyone knew this was coming, just as it was in everyone's interest to pretend they didn't. And what is happening in Greece will soon be happening wherever insolvent welfare states are found, which is in virtually all post-industrial democracies.
Democracy is a consequence of economic development. Once states reach a certain level of per capita income (sometimes called the "takeoff" point by economists), the power of kings and queens gives way to the triumph of the bourgeoisie and, eventually, the proletariat.
However, as the franchise expands in such a fashion, the goal of political action is altered--whereas the voting efforts of the propertied classes in incipient democracies were directed primarily toward limiting taxation imposed by the crown ("no taxation without representation"), with more developed, inclusive democracy comes demands for government benefits to be paid for by those with greater wealth and property.
Hence, the creation of the modern welfare state as we know it, based on the principle of redistribution of wealth from those who have more of it to those who have less. Although initially guided to some extent by compassion and noblesse oblige, such systems ultimately become means by which the have-nots expropriate the wealth of the haves by voting themselves benefits.
The incentive structures influencing elected officials are also altered by such arrangements: Whereas in earlier periods there were sufficient incentives to protect the consequences of what James Madison called the "unequal faculties of acquiring property," with the welfare state comes a bidding process in which those promising the most benefits receive the most votes.
Under modern welfare-state democracy, candidates less willing to redistribute wealth out of a sense of fiscal responsibility are placed at an electoral disadvantage in relation to those more willing to spend other people's money, deficit and debt be damned.
It has come to be an immutable law of politics that welfare states, once established, inexorably expand, with the generosity and array of benefits increasing in tandem with the proportion of the electorate receiving and becoming dependent upon them. The ratio between those contributing and those taking out gradually shifts in favor of the latter and against the former, with decisive electoral consequences.
Such tendencies are even more irresistible because disguised in the language of social justice, rights, and entitlements (as if there can ever be anything just about subsisting off other people's labor or one can actually be entitled to unearned income). The bribing of the electorate is thereby concealed by lofty rhetoric, with the attendant corruption of both language and politics.
An ironic sequence thus develops, wherein economic development leads to mass democracy and expansive welfare states, but those same welfare states, as they continue to grow and pile up debt, undermine the affluence upon which both welfare-state arrangements and democracy depend. The end-point of the sequence--fiscal collapse of the kind Greece is now experiencing--guarantees a harsher form of poverty because it wipes out not just jobs and wealth but the welfare state as well.
Political scientists long ago established a relationship between economic and political development (defined as liberal democracy), but are perhaps only now, with the spectacle of Greece before us and others likely to follow, beginning to explore the factors causing the decay of prosperous democracies, at the heart of which lies the deficits and debt caused by unbridled entitlement growth.
A corollary to the idea that mass democracy fosters fiscally ruinous welfare states might be that the longer the welfare state exists, the more difficult to reverse course and reform it. As the Greek referendum indicates, proposals for even modest cuts in such spending and benefits, however necessary, entail great electoral risk.
Not every post-industrial democracy has reached the dismal financial and infantile electoral condition of Greece, but almost all, including America, are headed in the same direction, guided by the same impulses.
Reality is harsh, and there will always be excuses for looking the other way, especially when, deep down, we know the problem looks back at us from the mirror.
So there will still be fantasists among us claiming that there is no cause for alarm, and who will argue that the best way to solve problems caused by spending too much money is to spend even more. As if the way to get out of a deep hole is to dig faster.
While the Greeks reject the consequences of their own irresponsibility and thereby hasten and make harsher their rendezvous with reality, in this country socialist Bernie Sanders, whose political program is largely indistinguishable from that which brought Greece to ruin, attracts massive crowds and becomes the darling of liberals (who always insist they're not socialists).
Go figure.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 07/13/2015