Authored by ‘no01’ via Gold and Geopolitics substack,
I have a dream where politicians live next door to you…
Not metaphorically.
Literally…
The man who voted to rezone your street works three doors down. His kids go to the same school as yours. When he raises the local tax rate and the potholes don’t get fixed, he drives over those same potholes every morning. And when the community has had enough, they let him know. Loudly. Personally. The way humans have held each other accountable for most of history, before we invented the beautiful abstraction of “institutional distance”.
I know. It sounds naive.
Let me explain why I don’t think it is…
We live in an era that treats political monopoly as completely normal while losing its mind over market monopolies. Regulators drag Google into congressional hearings for owning search. They fine Microsoft for bundling browsers. They write entire legislative frameworks to prevent one company from becoming too dominant in any given market because we all understand, instinctively, what monopoly does: it kills accountability, it kills innovation, it raises prices, and it entrenches mediocrity. The monopolist has no reason to improve because you have nowhere else to go.
And then we hand the same monopoly structure to the people who control our laws, our taxes, our foreign policy, our money supply, and we call it “democracy”.
The irony is immaculate.
The European Union is the cleanest example of what happens when you take this logic to its conclusion. The European Commission – the body that actually initiates legislation – is not elected. The Parliament, which is elected, cannot propose laws. It can only approve or reject what the Commission puts in front of it. The commissioners are appointed by national governments, serve five-year terms, and answer to a structure so opaque that most Europeans couldn’t name a single one of them without Googling.
This isn’t a flaw in the design.
It IS the design.
Unaccountable by architecture.
And Brussels is just the most visible layer. NATO, the UN, the WEF, the IMF – the whole ecosystem of supranational governance operates on the same principle: decisions made by people you didn’t elect, cannot remove, and will never meet. Corruption doesn’t require evil people. It requires structures where there are no consequences for failure and no competition for alternatives. Give anyone a monopoly with no accountability and you don’t need to assume malice. Incentives do the rest.
Though, to be fair, the incentives also attract a specific type of person.
Friedrich Hayek made this point in “The Road to Serfdom”: in any large bureaucratic structure, it is not the best people who rise to the top. It is the people most willing to compromise, most comfortable with ambiguity about means versus ends, most talented at political manoeuvring.
Power selects for a particular psychology. Always has. And once you centralise enough of it into structures that nobody can vote out, you’ve created the perfect habitat for exactly the people you least want running things.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe pushed this further in “Democracy: The God That Failed”, making an argument that sounds monstrous until you actually think about it: monarchs, counterintuitively, have better incentives than democratic politicians. A king owns the country. He passes it to his heirs. His time horizon is generational – he has every reason to keep the thing functional long-term. A democratic politician has a four-year window. He doesn’t own anything. He’s a temporary caretaker with a short lease and no liability for what he leaves behind. So he extracts. He borrows against the future. He promises what cannot be delivered because he won’t be around when the bill arrives. You don’t have to agree with Hoppe’s conclusions to recognise that the time-horizon problem is real and unsolved.
The answer though in my opinion isn’t ‘monarchy’.
The answer is competition.
Hayek had a second insight (this one from “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, his 1945 essay in the American Economic Review), and it’s the one that made him famous: “The Knowledge Problem”.
Central planners fail not because they’re stupid, but because the knowledge they need is dispersed, local, contextual, and impossible to aggregate centrally. The price of tomatoes in a village market contains information no ministry of agriculture could replicate. When you centralise decisions, you lose the signal.
The same is true in politics. A bureaucrat in Brussels setting housing policy for Tallinn, Seville, and Ghent simultaneously is not making informed decisions. He’s making averaged guesses applied uniformly to situations that are not uniform. The knowledge that actually matters – what this or that neighbourhood needs, what these people value, what tradeoffs they’re willing to make – exists locally. It always has.
The economist Charles Tiebout formalised this in 1956, though the intuition is much older: municipalities that compete for residents are forced to govern well. If your city raises taxes and delivers nothing, people leave. The tax base shrinks.
The city either improves or it hollows out. Residents “vote with their feet” – a form of continuous democratic feedback that no election cycle can match, because it happens in real time and has immediate financial consequences for the state. Tiebout called it “fiscal federalism”. I’d call it capitalism applied to governance. Same principle. You have options, so the provider has to perform.
Liechtenstein wrote this into its constitution directly: any village has the right to secede from the principality by referendum. It has never happened. It doesn’t need to. The right to leave is enough to enforce good behaviour. Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own tax rate, its own laws, its own character. Zurich and Appenzell Innerrhoden are barely recognisable as the same country. And Switzerland, despite being landlocked, multilingual, and geographically inconvenient, consistently ranks among the most prosperous and stable places on earth. Coincidence is not the explanation.
Now add the OTHER half of the dream.
No professional politician class.
This isn’t even a new idea. The Romans had the cursus honorum – a structured series of civic roles that citizens were expected to fill as a duty, not as a career.
The Athenians used sortition, selecting officials by lottery from eligible citizens, on the logic that any competent adult could govern and that elections primarily select for rhetoric and ambition rather than competence. Switzerland still operates a militia democracy at the cantonal level – officials who hold day jobs and govern part-time. The professional politician is a modern aberration, roughly a century old, and the results speak for themselves.
The requirement I’d add: you cannot spend more than 50% of your time on political duties. The other half you work. Not consulting, not board membership, not “advising” – you do something that produces a tangible output. You build something, fix something, teach something, grow something. You stay in contact with the reality that your decisions affect.
A transport minister who commutes by train. A housing regulator who rents. A labour minister who has been hired and fired. The skin-in-the-game principle that Nassim Taleb has been banging on about for decades: those who make decisions must bear the consequences of those decisions. The current system is precisely inverted – politicians make decisions whose consequences fall entirely on others, often long after the politician in question has retired comfortably on a parliamentary pension.
And pay them accordingly. Prestige, not salary. The Romans understood this. The Swiss still understand it. When you make politics lucrative, you attract people who are primarily motivated by the lucrative. When you make it a duty, you get different candidates. Not perfect candidates – nothing produces those – but structurally different ones.
The accountability piece is the last thread, and maybe the most important.
Human scale. That’s what’s missing from every layer of modern governance above the local. When the city councillor who approved the bad zoning decision is someone you recognise at the market, something changes. Not because everyone will tar and feather him (though the option is clarifying). But because social accountability is the oldest and most effective enforcement mechanism we have. It predates courts, predates elections, predates states. You live in a community. You face the people affected by your choices. That feedback loop, compressed into institutional distance, is exactly what supranational governance destroys. Nobody in Brussels faces any community. Nobody at the IMF shops at the same supermarket as the Greeks they were advising in 2010.
The counterarguments are real and worth taking seriously for thirty seconds.
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Defence: small states are vulnerable. True – but there’s a difference between voluntary defensive alliances and permanent supranational governments. NATO started as one and became the other. You can coordinate on specific shared threats without surrendering legislative sovereignty. Switzerland manages it fine.
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Race to the bottom on standards: if states compete, won’t they all rush to the lowest tax, weakest regulation, most exploitable environment? Sometimes. Singapore didn’t. Switzerland didn’t. Liechtenstein didn’t. Competition also produces race to the top – the record is mixed, and the assumption that centralisation produces good standards is contradicted by every agricultural subsidy regime in EU history.
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Not everyone can move: valid, and the most serious objection. Foot-voting privileges the mobile. But the competitive pressure benefits even those who stay, because the government that loses mobile residents to better-governed neighbours has immediate incentive to improve. You don’t have to leave for the dynamic to work. You just have to be able to leave.
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Global problems need global solutions: pandemics, climate, nuclear proliferation. Coordination on specific, defined problems with voluntary treaty structures is not the same thing as permanent supranational government with legislative power and no democratic accountability. We managed to coordinate on nuclear non-proliferation without building a world government. The argument proves too much.
My dream ain’t a utopia.
My dream is incentives that work instead of incentives that reliably produce what we currently have.
I have a dream where the man who raised your taxes has to look you in the eye at the weekend.
