Perhaps its because of the military junta deposing an elected official. I don’t know anything about the situation but it seems to me that his policies wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it was if there was equitable income distribution to begin with.
There is much more to it than that, and it is very complicated. This is not and has never been a true Western-style democracy. It’s always the military in control in the background, and Thaksin basically overstepped his bounds and encroached on their power.
“Bread and Circuses” came about in Rome because of the decay of the middle class as Rome evolved from a republic to an empire. Short version as follows:
Originally Rome was a republic in which the average middle class citizen was a militiaman in war and a farmer in peace. But this class was severely undercut after the Punic wars as Rome expanded into an international empire. The militia was suitable for purely defensive wars close to home but became strained by years of foreign service. Being away to war for years meant that many lost their farms. And the very success of the wars led to the increased import of slaves from conquered provinces, which in turn meant that the wealthy could buy up bankrupt small farms and run them as plantations with slaves.
This led to the rise of the urban class known as the “proletariat”. Unlike the later Marxist use of the term to mean the working class, the Roman proletariat were the economically displaced who had Roman citizenship as their only asset. They had little employ other than manual labor in which again they were competing with imported slaves. The sole thing they had was the right as Roman citizens to vote, and they pretty much ended up selling their votes to whoever could give them the best deal. This usually amounted to free or subsidized food, and publicly funded spectacles. Bread and circuses is what you get when the remnants of a former middle class retain the legal trappings of middle class citizenship long after the economic foundation of that class has vanished. Cullen Murphy in his book “Are We Rome?” traces the evolution (or decay) of the Latin word “suffragium”, originally meaning “ballot” and eventually devolving into “bribe”, and draws a direct analogy to the English word “franchise”.
Think it can’t happen today? The last more or less defensive war the US fought with a citizen army was World War Two; the experience of Vietnam was that you couldn’t fight a geostrategic war with disgruntled conscripts; and we’ve been moving more towards a professional class of troops like the ancient Legions with every passing decade. We don’t import slaves from conquered provinces anymore but we’ve spent trillions of dollars on making the world safe for outsourcing. The ranting of right-wing populists like the Tea Baggers is a symptom that a hell of a lot of middle class people see their way of life vanishing into globalization, in which it seems like the last three professions left in America will be politician/lobbyist, executive/stock broker, and career soldier. People bitterly protest illegal immigration not because they want the bottom of the barrel jobs immigrants take but because we’re appalled by the appearance that those jobs and those who fill them are increasingly all that’s left of the native economy. And polticians are exploiting those sentiments in exactly the same way that an ancient Roman consul would.
Interesting analogy, although I’d say automation not outsourcing is the modern equivalent of slavery.
Well, of course the problem can be solved by zapping the power sources from orbit.
Short answer: it’s too easy. Giving people money is a sure way to attain their loyalty, and we believe that politicians should win loyalty by actually doing a good job rather than placating particular interest groups.
Well . . . The Romans did not have a secret ballot, which provides a practical obstacle to “selling your vote,” at least on a direct one-on-one basis.
You are assuming, where you should be arguing, that there is a difference.
How do you define “doing a good job”? Arguably, if the people want bread and circuses then the government is doing a good job if it provides those things.
The reason why giving the people what they want can be a bad idea is if one group is favored at the expense of another group. Taking from the provinces to feed the city; taking from foreigners to give to the Empire; taking from the natives to give to the settlers; taking from blacks to give to whites; taking from Jews to give to Christians; taking from the poor to give to rich; taking from the rich to give to the poor; taking from future generations to give to today’s generation - all examples of this.
What government spending does not require taking money from someone and create net winners and losers?
I suppose arguably you could claim that some collective benefits are beyond the means of any small group or individual to purchase but benefit all of society. But overall I agree that most government spending is incurred at somebody’s expense and directed to somebody else’s benefit. Nonetheless, virtually everyone agrees to some level of government taxation and spending. So it’s a question of whether the benefit is worth the cost.
But to get back to my previous question, what would you define as the government doing a good job?
Let me put it another way. In a democracy, or in any form of government, for that matter, the way to stay in power is to have a larger number of more powerful people strongly on your side. You can crudely say that your influence is (number of people) * (political power of such people) * (strength of attachment to you). You want this number to be bigger than that of your opponents. And of course political power does not mean fancy boardrooms and other rich-white-male stereotypes, but rather their ability to exert political influence: this can just as well be wild-haired hippies who like a good protest and don’t mind getting arrested.
Now there are two ways to go about this: one is to make good policies that bring benefit to as many people as possible and maximize total happiness. I would say many politicians from both parties today try to achieve this, and differ only on their definition of “benefit” and the means by which they accomplish this. The second is to cultivate a narrow, highly dedicated group of people, and throw as many resources at them as possible, to make them fiercely loyal to you and therefore “out-influence” everyone else. In this case the politician says to hell with total happiness, as long as I get this group to be happy and loyal.
The popular image of “bread and circuses” is unfortunate, since it conjures up images of a tiny elite bribing the numberless masses. In reality the poor urban population of Rome was a small minority of the people in the Empire, and bread and circuses were a way for particular aristocrats to gain their political support (which mainly meant the ability to incite riots on demand) at the expense of their rivals.
Today the narrow interest group can be anything from GM unions to industrial lobbies to teacher’s unions. When a politician focuses on throwing pork to a pack of activists for hire, that’s bad for everyone else and that’s bad politics.
Lots of kinds. Street lights make the street brighter for the rich and poor alike. Publicly funded paved streets and highways facilitate personal transportation for all and keep the economy humming along for all. The CDC prevents plagues that could strike anybody. Public schools and libraries make the whole of society more educated, enlightened, informed, and competitive in the global marketplace. If there is a progressive income tax so that the rich pay a larger share of their incomes for those public goods than others do, what’s wrong with that? They’re still “net winners” – that is, they’re still rich.
“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
– Adam Smith
Some other insightful quotations from Smith:
“Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate … Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
“The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.”
And, of course, a great deal of public expense is in fact covered by non-progressive taxes, such as sales tax and property tax. (Everybody pays property tax. If you rent your home, part of your rent goes for your landlord’s property tax. If you buy something in a store, part of the purchase price goes for the store’s landlord’s property tax.)
N.B.: In a democracy, as opposed to other forms of government, you are supposed to get power simply by having more people on your side, regardless of how rich or powerful they may be. That is the point of democracy.
If it proves not to work out that way, that just means you need to change something, e.g., campaign-finance reform.
In theory, sure. In practice, why do you think we still have agricultural subsidies and teacher union dominance? Campaign finance reform may reduce some inequalities but power is a zero-sum game, and it will merely accentuate the other inequalities.
I won’t speak to teacher’s unions, but agriculture support is one area where government does great good. Due to long time lags between clearing the land and marketing the goods, difficulty of long term storage, and even more so to the unpredictability of weather, it is virtually impossible for a pure market based system to provide stable supply and prices of agricultural goods.
The only insurance against shortages or worse is to assure a small surplus even in times of drought or blight, which means a great surplus in normal years, and a ridiculous oversupply in productive years. Such surpluses, in a free market, guarantee price collapse, to the ruin of the producers. This then leads to severe shortages in the next lean year, and an endless boom and bust cycle for growers.
I freely admit that much of current farm legislation goes well beyond these aims, my point is only that as long as agricultural production depends on the vagueness of weather, there is great social benefit in subsidizing the producers. It is not the votes of farmers that are being purchased but the votes of consumers who prefer not to spend $20 on a loaf of bread.