The moment serving turns into punishing, the game’s over. If your plan requires injury and making life worse so people beg for your solution, that’s leverage and a terrorist shakedown, not leadership. Calmly describing pain as a way to push through policy is just a deranged psychopath’s pragmatism. Well, at least you know your candidate for Liberal Democracy a little better now.

Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy

– Jay Jones

And the cycle is always the same: create a mess, sell the cleanup, then blame the mop when the floor’s still sticky. New programs, new slogans, new budgets create the same problems, now with amazingly diverse and long-lasting side effects. They don’t every tell the public that if you never introduce the unnecessary, you don’t need emergency powers to manage the unnecessary. We’d tell them every time not to meddle in the unknown, and they’d have limited powers to create ruinous disasters that give government importance to fix the problems they decided to invent and impose.

When the public pushes back, out come the cute techniques of democracy to manipulate the public in the form of nudges, euphemisms, cleverly curated data, propaganda, lies, media storytelling, and selective leaks. You’re not hearing a debate; the government you are paying for is using all of its techniques to manufacture compliance and call it consensus. It’s deceptive by design. And if that fails, crank up the pain with slow permits, squeeze wallets, replace the population, restrict movement, throttle speech and call obedience to that “responsibility” which is darkly funny because nothing Democratic politicians do is based in responsibility to the public.

Public servants should obey, not rule. Governments and politicians are slaves, not masters, and need to sit in their proper positions. They are unfit to lead: envious, irresponsible, greedy, deceptive, revengeful, hungry for power they will never deserve, and perceptively aware of their inferiority. No wonder they are trying to remake society to change their reality. That’s not what citizens want though. Just like no one wants third-world immigrants and certainly not to be replaced by millions of random people, politicians bring them over anyway. No one takes responsibility for the ruined societies left behind when those people recreate the same disasters they are fleeing.

On hot-button issues, notice the pattern: people say one thing, institutions deliver the opposite, and the explanation is “complicated.” Maybe it is. So explain it. Put the models, tradeoffs, and receipts on the table. If you can’t argue for a policy without smearing dissent or hiding the ball, it’s not a public good – it’s a private agenda with a press release. But we don’t ever get an explanation or semblance of rational discourse. It’s deliberate panic over what politicians created and pretend to be surprised about. You’ll notice there are no rational debates or comparisons, just engineered and managed declined with calls to accept that things are now worse as if we somehow had decades of bad weather.

There should be great amusement in the recent synchronized attempts to lock down citizens in surveillance states so that communication and money are both digitally controlled, allowing dissidents to be cancelled if they criticize a government policy or have a public discussion that expressed an idea or opinion their rulers have forbidden. In a proper ordering, citizens should be able to speak freely about ideas and opinions, but politicians should have to represent the people they were elected to represent, not put their personal thoughts or party thoughts above the people. Governments around the world are so desperate they need to censor ideas from being freely exchanged and punish communication by controlling money so that dissidents speaking true ideas that reveal government policy as inept can be efficiently cancelled without having to send police to arrest them. The only thing good about these proposals is that it suggests desperation, which means a confrontation is looming and there is a change government will lose and people will retain their rights to speak honestly.

So what do we do about inept rulers who have too much power? Simple, not easy:

• Make power boring again. If holding office is a path to clout, you’ll get clout chasers who sell access to power, costing the public money and quality.
• Publish assumptions, data, costs, and error bars before the vote. If a policy needs fear to pass, it needs proof to last.
• Sunset everything. Big levers expire by default. If they work, re-earn them in daylight with proof. If not, lights out for another mistake tolerated too long before we could return to normalcy.
• Single-subject bills. No policy piñatas stuffed with unrelated goodies. One idea, one vote.
• Hard walls on conflicts. If you regulate a sector, you don’t get to cash in on it ever.
• Speech stays messy. Democracy is a contact sport for ideas. If your plan demands silence or a propaganda flood, fix the plan.

As for the old “incompetence or malice” debate…honestly, who cares? If your house is flooding, you turn off the water before you psychoanalyze the plumber. The outcome is what matters. Politicians should have far less control over daily life. They should be unimportant, not people who remake society with crazy experiments no one requested. Every citizens wishes for the society we used to have, we only argue about how many decades back we’d settle for. Stop all the unwanted changes and we can start recreating what we used to have, and keep making it better.

Public servants are not protagonists in a prestige drama. They’re support staff for a civilization some of us are building. Put them back in the right job as steward and custodian, not celebrities and rulers. Shrink their radius to where they have the chance to accomplish something good and no further, like maintaining roads, keeping the town clean, and protecting traditionally established rights.

The rest is on us to mock their undesired politicians and unless competence is demonstrated, always reduce the power of politicians. And when someone in a nice suit tells you pain is the point, remember that in a free country, the point is freedom. The pain they create is how they force us to accept what we don’t want. Perhaps a little reflective pragmatism will spare no small pain to remind politicians to serve the public to whom they must remain loyal.