Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [15]
This leads to the fourth point, which is that the Elites have already won the key battle once their high-caste technocratic "army" of academics, managers, captains, et al. identify this intellectual framework as being in their own self-interest. These technocrats are members of a loyal upper "caste" which defends and enforces the Elites' dominance over the rest of the citizenry.
Even as the economy slips into a Plantation-like structure populated by debt-serfs laboring under the illusion they are free spirits pursuing their own self-interest, the upper caste technocrats labor to maintain a façade of "entertaining" staged "news" that masks the "theft by other means" (looting, embezzlement, fraud, collusion, etc.) that is the modus operandi of an unaccountable Plutocracy.
As on a Plantation, the power and wealth owned by a small Elite indentures the majority of wage earners via the mechanism of crushing debt (debt-serfdom). Debt-serfs are managed and policed by a managerial caste of overseers (lunas in the terminology of the Hawaiian plantation where I worked in the late 1960s).
The fifth point is that this process of gaining compliance is not a conspiracy; it is a complex mixture of conscious and subconscious realignments of incentives and disincentives to maximize attractive risk-return opportunities (i.e. windfall exploitation and exemptions from market forces) for the Plutocracy and its upper-caste workforce.
Thus the incentives for public employees to game the system to boost their retirement pay (effectively looting the public treasury in the process) are high while the penalties, thanks in part to union protection, are minimal.
In a similar way, the chicken farm which dumps its waste directly into the bay has a large incentive (profits) to avoid regulations which would require treatment of its vast waste. If it only costs $1 million in campaign donations to persuade lawmakers to exempt the farm from environmental regulations while the treatment plant would cost $10 million, the cost-benefit analysis is clear: buy the legislative loopholes and continue killing the bay.
With elections becoming ever costlier, the lawmakers have incentives to garner large contributions from enterprises that need "to present our perspective." It isn't corruption per se but simply the "rational response" to incentives and cost-benefit ratios embedded in the very structure of the system.
Once the entire system is riddled with gamesmanship, looting, loopholes and exemptions for the Elite and secret dispensation of public funds, then belief in the supporting intellectual framework and the fairness of the system fades. The middle class outside the "caste" of State technocrats is squeezed by Plutocratic and State over-reach; as they drop out then the taxes they paid to support the ever-growing State decline, eventually leading to the State's insolvency.
The sixth point is that empires and States collapse when the costs far outweigh the marginal gains; in effect the cost of maintaining the over-reaching State and Plutocracy far exceeds the increasingly marginal benefits provided by the State and "belief in the system." Marginal benefits are low, marginal costs are high.
One example of this is medicinal. Antibiotics provide enormous benefits for low marginal costs. In contrast to this tremendous leverage--low costs produce enormous gains--modern pharmaceuticals are often staggeringly costly even as their benefits are minimal. Adding a costly medication to a senior's already long list of drugs is extremely costly (high marginal costs) even as it offers scant or even negative benefits (low marginal benefit).
The seventh point is that structures (both political and intellectual) which once made sense are extended to absurdity as the State and Plutocracy over-reach (over-borrow, over-leverage, take increasingly large risks to sustain the status quo, increase taxation and looting,