No More Klatura II

clipped from esr.ibiblio.org I think the answer to Mancur Olson’s great question may be heaving itself into view. In The Logic Of Collective Action and later works, Olson developed the thesis that democratic politics must more or less inevitably degenerate into a mad scramble among interest groups seeking to corner ever-higher rents from their ability to swing votes; see my previous post Some Iron Laws of Political Economics for discussion. So, where does it end? Increasingly, it looks like the answer is “when the creditors of the resulting Ponzi scheme decide they’ve had enough”. Under today’s conditions, given who’s holding the biggest wad of T-bonds, that decision will probably be made in Peking.