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By Root 1967 0

of this systemic overhead is protected by an Elite or fiefdom with an asymmetric stake in the game, and thus each is impervious to meaningful reform. Since these high overhead costs are systemic in nature--meaning every enterprise pays high costs--then reforming any one layer, as painful as that will be, exerts a trivial reduction in overall systemic costs.

These high systemic costs constitute yet another insurmountable structural barrier to reform as they insure that whatever cost-cutting is accomplished will produce essentially trivial results despite its stupendous political cost.

Key concepts in this chapter:

Power density

The grand failure of government

Internecine conflict between protected fiefdoms

Theft by other means (inflation and devaluation)

Asymmetric Stakes in the Game

Transactional churn

Chapter Twenty-One: Incentives to Opt Out, Disincentives to Protest

When the inevitability of devolution and collapse becomes "obvious," the incentives for the productive to opt out will grow.

If structural reform is essentially impossible due to these mechanisms, then we must conclude the only alternatives are either devolution (erosion/degradation of the status quo into national insolvency) or a positive-feedback (self-reinforcing) collapse into national insolvency.

This conclusion will become increasingly "obvious" in the sense that the simulacrum politics of experience marketed by the mass media will lose credibility as the divergence between the lived experience of devolution and what's being presented as "reality" by the status quo widens to the breaking point.

The non-productive citizenry who are dependent on the State and its Power Elite partners in the entertainment/"news" industry (bread and circuses) will increasingly be channeled into fatalistic resignation, though some stirrings of dissatisfaction may bubble to the surface.

But lacking the organization and the (largely illusory) sense of political importance which the productive middle class enjoys, the unproductive classes are limited to spontaneous bursts of frustration and discontent which are easily suppressed by the still-formidable powers of the State. (Such restive "rebellions" will provide entertaining, titillating dollops of "news" even as they are ruthlessly crushed.)

The productive middle class is currently divided between the dwindling majority basking in a thinly buttressed complacency that the crumbling status quo is still in their best interests and a growing minority who have tasted either the ashes of personal insolvency or experienced the spiritual, ethical and financial bankruptcy of the status quo, including the mass media, the State and whatever cartel of the Plutocracy they have had the misfortune to encounter.

The middle class has been trained by years of "higher education" and other experience to fear the repercussions of political engagement (whistleblowers' careers are always the first fatalities) and to dismiss or discount the larger political forces which trigger crises in households (insolvency, enormous medical bills, etc). That is, they have been trained to internalize all causal factors--"if only I'd done X and Y, this wouldn't have happened"--a politics of experience which gives the State and Plutocracy a free hand to plunder, exploit and manipulate without fear of middle class resistance or insurrection.

Given the legitimate fears of legal and financial recriminations of resistance, the middle class has little appetite for the costs of resistance or protest such as having their heads truncheoned by riot police or garnering arrest records which could dog their career.

Fear of reprisal is a key State control technique even in a so-called free state. The restive nonproductive citizen could find his or her food stamps, disability and other "free" State largesse suddenly cut by opaque administrative measures.

The upstart middle class earner/small business owner could find their contract canceled, their position eliminated, their bonus axed, their credit cut, trumped up "disciplinary" charges have been