Anyone who wants to see how this will play out might care to look at Australia following the centralisation of fiscal policy under the Uniform Tax Cases of 19. The next stage of this process is the centralisation of power through the use of fiscal policy: blackmailing member states by applying conditions to the return of the taxes collected from their citizens. I might also mention the democratic Swiss's longstanding refusal to surrender their sovereignty. Likewise, the centralisation of monetary policy was opposed in the only two countries (Denmark and Sweden) in which those being governed were given a chance to vote directly on that specific issue.
It went ahead nevertheless, after further voting was banned. In the case of the EU this was vividly demonstrated by the centralising European Constitution which was not only NOT supported democratically but was positively OPPOSED democratically by voters in France and the Netherlands. Centralised governments typically form by seeking democratic consent for the surrender of very limited powers and then seizing ever more powers without democratic consent. Is there any presumption that political rent seeking will ultimately allocate offices to the ‘best’ persons? Is there not the overwhelming presumption that offices will be secured by those who value power most highly and who seek to use such power of discretion in the furtherance of their personal projects, be these moral or otherwise? Genuine public-interest motivations may exist and may even be widespread, but are these motivations sufficiently passionate to stimulate people to fight for political office, to compete with those whose passions include the desire to wield power over others?” (James Buchanan and Geoffrey Brennan, “The Reason of Rules”.) Unfortunately for the EU, genuine Democracy (any system of government chosen by those being governed using a non-privileging aggregation device) tends to oppose the centralisation of power. These persons will tend to be the highest bidders in the allocation of political offices.
In the same way, positions of political power will tend to attract those persons who place higher values on the possession of such power. As Nobel Laureate James Buchanan pointed out, Elective Government tends to "adversely select" the most narcissistic, machiavellian and megalomaniacal political agents: “uppose that a monopoly right is to be auctioned whom will we predict to be the highest bidder? Surely we can presume that the person who intends to exploit the monopoly power most fully, the one for whom the expected profit is highest, will be among the highest bidders for the franchise. It might be a good start to ban the practice of using "Democracy" to refer to Elective Government.
Historically, populists have tended to be more effective from the outside, where they can help to focus mainstream politicians’ minds on questions they would prefer to avoid. One therefore should not read too much into failures of “populist” governance. Whenever an angry public puts political adventurists in power, it is only a matter of time before they reveal that they have no real solutions to people’s problems. On the contrary, the establishment has re-established itself.
Despite these upheavals, predictions of democratic collapse have not been borne out. No wonder advanced economies have experienced periodic explosions of anger in recent years – from Donald Trump’s election and the Brexit referendum in 2016 to the subsequent gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) protests in France and an election in Italy that brought two anti-establishment parties to power. Many metrics highlight this trend, but perhaps the most telling comes from the OECD, which reports a 4% decline in household median net wealth across its member countries since 2010. LONDON – COVID-19 has wounded almost every developed country, but the truth is that living standards in many of them had been stagnating or declining for years.
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