The Kakistocracy of the Marketplace

Democracy is conventionally regarded as a matter of "one person, one vote."

Capitalism, by contrast (its proponents prefer to speak of "the market," or rather "The Market," but capitalism is what they are really talking about) is susceptible to characterization as a matter of "one dollar, one vote."

The result is that, market populist stupidities notwithstanding, those with the dollars get a hugely disproportionate vote, with the result that economic life reflects the preferences of a few as against the many, with the situation in, for example, housing, reflective of this. The homes available to the public for purchase are the homes that the real estate sector wants to sell them--cheaply and even flimsily built yet expensively priced, high-maintenance (WHICH NOBODY EVER WANTED!) yet all but designed to make that maintenance as difficult and expensive and painful as possible, an eternal process of repair and renovation which makes the 99 percent poorer, all in line with an economy where the housing market exists to enable speculators to reap paper fortunes, rather than provide shelter for humans.

Disgusting and disastrous as this is it can and does work in other ways, not least in the chase by people who have dollars after still more dollars insofar as they can make something by giving somebody what that person seems to want--and the adage that "A fool and his money are soon parted" relevant--as when we consider the saturation of our media with pandering to the obsession with celebrity. It may well be that only a relatively small part of the population really, really cares all that much about celebrities, but all the same, the obsessions of that minority determine what the rest of us have inflicted us to an exceedingly disproportionate degree. Thus an economy that has been badly decaying for almost everyone for a very long time may be slipping toward official recession again, the world's wars are multiplying and metastasizing (notice how little press coverage the confrontation with Venezuela is getting?), authoritarianism and outright fascism on the march in a way evoking the 1930s in the minds of all but the most historically illiterate, and the ecosystem deteriorating fast, but we hear ceaselessly about what may or may not be the personal politics of an actress no one had heard of but a few years ago and who may not be well remembered a few years hence, and why this "tech billionaire" missed that dinner at the White House--because all of this is "safe" territory for the brass check earners, but also because of the fascination of the weak-minded conformist with those that a profoundly broken society has elevated to a position where they are in everyone's face ALL THE TIME, permitting the clickbait about them to work as clickbait by baiting people of a certain mentality, the dumbest of us in this way determining what the rest of us are forced to wade through as we go about onlife life because of the exploitability of their stupidity in this kakistocracy of the marketplace.